Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/559

Rh is another called the Casquina. Both are navigable for steamers drawing less than ten feet; those requiring deeper water than this must use the southern and main branch of the Orinoco. This one is naturally always preferred by ships. The water of the river is a thick yellow, and the current is as swift as four or five miles an hour. As we went on all day, the Macareo narrowed to about one hundred feet, but was very deep. The banks appeared quite uninhabited until we reached the Orinoco proper. First we passed two very small Indian villages. The houses consisted merely of grass roofs and wooden pillars, being quite open on all sides, and disclosing numbers of hammocks each containing a nearly nude Indian. Near by were fields of mandioc and bananas. On the beach small pirogues were drawn up. At one place some of the boys paddled out to us, and in wanton sport threw on board many sticks of sugar cane. These Indians had stout, strong bodies and broad and good-natured physiognomies, with their hair 'banged' across the forehead and left long at the sides.

"In its vast size, and large and numerous islands, the Orinoco is not unlike the Amazon, but the banks differ from the Amazon's chiefly in their greater profusion of lianas, the forests being not only decked but half covered with them. After the Indian villages, we passed, upon the Macareo, long lines of widely separated mud huts, belonging to negroes and low-class Creoles. All these people wore clothes, had a variety of cooking utensils, and better dwellings than the pure Indians. Near where the Macareo enters the main branch of the Orinoco is a small town called Barrancas—simply two short streets of dilapidated mud huts. We stopped only ten minutes to send our boat ashore with the mail, and to bring on board two or three passengers. Some very large islands invite the view hereabout, and the distant ranges of the Imataca Mountains, ridge behind ridge, look blue and picturesque. The current of the Orinoco does not carry down the great number of grassy islands and tree trunks that one sees always on the Amazon. . . . A fine spectacle at night were the many great prairie fires, the whole sky being aglow with them. A certain fire would suddenly appear, tearing along at a terrific rate, with a blinding glare and long trail of smoke, recalling a night express train a thousand times magnified. The Venezuelans are accustomed to burn their savannas once a year. We had already left the regions of the pristine wilderness, and were now among the great savannas, or natural meadows of the central plains of Venezuela. The delta is the only thickly wooded part of the Orinoco, the upper portion of the river being bounded by the llanos, or great grassy and almost treeless plains."

Near the head waters of the Orinoco is its junction with the Cassiquiare, by which it has a navigable connection with a branch