VENEZUELA : 
52 
The chief towns of Venezuela are Caracas, the capital, and La 
Guayra, its seaport ; Valencia, which lies upon a curious lake, one 
of the most interesting of natural phenomena ; Puerto Cabello, 
where Sir Francis Drake dief] and was dropped into the water 
with a l)ag of shot at his heels, and Maracail)o, upon the lake of 
the same name, from which we get much of our coffee. 
The chief seajjort of Venezuela, La Guayra hy name, has the 
rci)Utation among sailors of having the worst harbor in the world. 
It is merely an open roadstead, beset by almost all the dangers 
and difficulties which seamanship can encounter. Even in calm 
weatlier the surf rolls up with a mighty volume and dashes into 
S})ray against the rocks uj)on which the toAvn is ljuilt ; but when 
a breeze is blowing, and one comes almost every afternoon, the 
waves are so liigh that loading or unloading vessels is dangerous 
and often impossible. 
Between La Guayra and Caracas is a mountain called La Silla, 
whicli reaches nearly 9,000 feet toward the sky and springs di- 
rectly from tlie sea. There is only a beach about two hundred 
feet in width at the foot of the peaks, along which La Guayra is 
stretched two miles or so — a .single street. Part of the town clings 
to the side of the momster like a creeper to the trunk of a tree, 
and one wonders tliat the earthquakes, which are common there, 
do not shake the houses off into the ocean. 
The distance in a straight line through the l)ase of the moun- 
tain would be only about four miles, and a Washington engineer 
once made ])lans for a tunnel and a calde railway, but it was too 
exi)ensive an undertaking. Over the dip in the saddle is an 
Indian trail about eight miles long, and in 1883 English engineers 
and capitalists l)uilt a railroad twenty-four miles long between 
the two ])laces, which climbs 3,600 feet in about twenty miles, 
and cree])S through a pass to the valley in which the ca})ital is 
situated. It is a remarkalile piece of engineering and offers the 
traveler a scenic view whose i)icturesqueness and grandeur have 
})een extolled from the time the Si)anish invaders came, in 1520, 
until now. IIunil)oldt says there is no picture combining the 
scenery of the mountains and the ocean so grand as this, except 
the i)eak of Teneriffe. It is as if Pike’s peak rose abruptly from 
the beach at Long Branch. 
There is nothing Indian about Caracas except its name, and 
it is one of the finest cities in South America. The climate is 
superb, being a perpetual spring, the thermometer seldom rising 
above 85 degrees and seldom falling below 60 ; there is not a 
