The Carácas residence lies not within the city, but a mile or so outside in a garden suburb developed during the last few years, approached by a charming flower-hung road. A broad motor-car drive runs up to the open front door, giving access to a wide, awning-shaded veranda and the cool rooms of the lower floor. Everybody has a car. Much of the population is of pure Spanish blood.

Above: In workaday garb. Short lengths of coarse material, or aprons of palm fibre, are the everyday garb worn by the aboriginal Indians of Venezuela

Here, on such an occasion as a children’s party, you appreciate the constancy with which Latin America looks across the seas to Western Europe, for all the little guests are dressed like delightful bisque-china dolls in French clothes; their manners are quite beautiful, and they dance gaily among the pink silk chairs. The parents, arriving in the glowing dusk to take away their offspring, are not the formal folk of Spanish traditon, by which the women are still all but secluded. There is an atmosphere of freedom and comradeship a frank interchange of thoughts and ideas between the sexes that speak eloquently of new ways.

Above: Conservatism in the backwoods. In his forest-clad habitat, surrounded by the solitudes of the Guayana jungle, the Waiomgomo fosters the beliefs and customs of his pagan ancestors, finding their inefficient ways of life more comfortable than those prescribed by the white civilization

It is true that you must drink liqueur with your tea, and that there are more extravagant sweets than you are accustomed to see, that the crystal-clear Spanish idiom is in your ears; but there is nothing “foreign” here; this is a society that conforms to the pleasant international standard. The parents of your hosts live in the city, in an “old” (i.e. 50 to 100 years old) house upon one floor; the heavily grilled windows open on to a main street, the enormous saguan door leads, through a wide opening, to the inside patio – a courtyard full of flowering shrubs with a pila playing in the middle; a veranda runs all about this patio, with every room of the four-square house opening on it.

Beyond, a second patio is surrounded by the kitchen and the servants’ quarters. With the saguan door barred, this is a fort, or rather, it follows the mode of Oriental houses constructed for the seclusion of women, the mode that the Moors carried to Spain, and that Spain carried to South America four hundred years ago.

Above: Sultry Afternoon in the main street of Peurto Cabello. Peurto Cabello, lying to the west of La Guayra, the port of Caracas, is practically at sea-level and is extremely hot. It has a considerable export trade and its harbour is one of the best in Venezuela; even the name, meaning Hair Port, was bestowed by the Spaniards to signify that a ship could be held with a hair in its tranquil waters.

No clmate could be sweeter than that of Carácas. But for white races none could be more pernicious than that of Maracaibo. Here, along a green, mosquito-haunted, heavily-hot coast, is an enormous lagoon, entered by none but small vessels because the sand-bar across its mouth prohibits ships of any considerable draught. Early Spanish explorers, discovering this bay, saw the same oddly built native houses that you may still find, perched above the margins of the water upon thin, shaky wooden legs, and constructed of wood and palm-thatch.

A primitive ladder, consisting sometimes of nothing more than a stout, notched bamboo pole, leads to this crow’s nest, and it was the sight of these lake-dwellings that gave the region the ironical name of Venezuela – “Little Venice.” Cassava root, plantains, beans and fish form the staple foods, the hammock is the chief article of furniture, and the villagers inherit much of the blood of the real natives of the country, those implacable “Indians” whose immense bows and poisoned arrows are still feared by the traveller who ventures into the deep interior.

Above: Lottery tickets for the many, lucky tickets for the few. Large public gambling schemes are in vogue in many of the cities of South America. Some governments have suppressed them as being injurious to the public good, while other legislatures authorise lotteries in order to devote their proceeds to public improvements. In Venezuela these games of chance are very popular and at La Guayra there is a church which was built by the sale of lottery tickets.

To-day these lake dwellers look down upon scenes of activity that bid fair to affect the life of all Venezuela. For it has been discovered that the great oil belt that lies all across the north of South America, from exterior islands such as Barbados to promontories in Ecuador, has formed huge deposits in the Maracaibo region. For years a keen competition between rival great companies has been fought upon this sweltering soil. All over the heat-hazed swamps near the lagoon, armies of geologists and engineers and road-makers have been brought in; thousands of tons of machinery, endless loads of construction material, carried into the bush and brought into service. Huge territories as big as Balkan kingdoms have been surveyed, probed, made to yield their underground stores of oil. Ten years of preparatory work and four or five millions of pounds sterling have paved the way for the stream of petroleum just commencing.

One thousand Venezuelans are labourers in this field, and the native-born, dark-skinned, dark-eyed, part Indian, part negro, with a dash of Spanish, has accustomed himself to regular hours and sustained toil. Wherever, in the colonial period, land was found suitable for sugar-cane crops, African slaves were imported, and the gregarious negro is still clustered in the same spots. He works as readily in the oil-fields as upon agricultural lands, and when you see him engaged in half a score of other occupations in Veneuzela you cannot deny his versatility.

In the miasmic swamp of Lake Bermudez the men work up to their waists in water, digging out the oozy asphalt; just across a strip of sea from the port of Cumaná is the pretty island of Margarita, where pearl-divers fetch up gems to the value of half a million bolivares annually; in the dry zones the collectors of the divi-divi pods, for tanning, fill thousands of sacks; the cocoa and coffee plantations call for another class of skill. Near Carúpano is a copra and coir factory; in the deep forest near Ciudad Bolivar on the Orinoco are the gatherers of balata (rubber), and of the chicle used for chewing-gum.