Our last view of Venezuela was like the first—a panorama of silent, majestic green walls, guarding a stream of brilliant copper; every one of the untold myriads of beating hearts beyond the walls resting silent in the noonday heat, waiting for the coolness of evening to awaken them to activity. To some it would bring song and happiness with nest and mate, to some combat, to others death. CHAPTER III. A WOMAN’S EXPERIENCES IN VENEZUELA. (_By Mary Blair Beebe._) The doings of the creatures in fur, feathers and scales kept us keenly interested from morning to night, yet in our wilderness search there were many unnatural history experiences—some disagreeable, others thrilling—but all so wholly delightful in their charm of strangeness to the woman who enjoyed them that the picture of our wilderness seems incomplete without them. Life on board a Venezuelan sloop is quite unlike any other experience in the world. Neither the woman who sits under the awning of a luxurious yacht nor her more adventurous sister who sails her own catboat over turbulent waters can form any idea of the daily life aboard such a craft. The night we set forth in our tiny sloop from the Island of Trinidad, headed for an unexplored part of the Orinoco delta, it was hard to realize that we were at last bound for South America, the land of our dreams. As you know we were, for the present, owners of a sloop flying the Venezuelan flag and manned by five men, of whom only the Captain knew a word of English. The charm of exploration and adventure laid a spell upon us both—El Señor Naturalista and me—and we watched in silence the sunset sky and the dim receding shores of Trinidad. But there was a certain stern reality about that first night aboard the “Josefa Jacinta” that soon broke in upon our reveries. When we descended to the tiny cabin to unpack, the sloop had begun to pitch heavily and we set ourselves to solve the problems of unstable equilibrium, which constantly shifting angles of 30° to 40° presented in both floor and walls. By courtesy we called our domicile a cabin, and we found that it would hold two people—at a pinch! [Illustration: FIG. 40. OUR SLOOP AT GUANOCO.] We unearthed our unused pneumatic mattresses and rigged up our gilded foot pump. For fifteen minutes W—— worked, then the mate was called and took a hand. Were we on a sinking ship and manning the pumps for our lives, greater exertions could not have been made, and the reward was a thin film of air within the rubber bed. Then we unscrewed the decorative but useless contrivance, and W—— began to blow. This proved effective, and in a few minutes we had placed the soft, air-filled cushions in our respective bunks. We dubbed these bunks catacombs at once, for the tiny niches into which we later crept were more like the vaults of a tomb than aught else.