It is a very remarkable railroad; its tracks cling to the perpendicular surface of the mountain like the tiny tendrils of a vine on a stone-wall, and the trains creep and crawl along the edge of its precipices, or twist themselves into the shape of a horseshoe magnet, so that the engineer on the locomotive can look directly across a bottomless chasm into the windows of the last car. The view from this train, while it pants and puffs on its way to the capital, is the most beautiful combination of sea and plain and mountain that I have ever seen. There are higher mountains and more beautiful, perhaps, but they run into a brown prairie or into a green plain; and there are as beautiful views of the ocean, only you have to see them from the level of the ocean itself, or from a chalk-cliff with the downs behind you and the white sand at your feet. But nowhere else in the world have I seen such magnificent and noble mountains running into so beautiful and green a plain, and beyond that the great blue stretches of the sea. When you look down from the car-platform you see first, stretching three thousand feet below you, the great green ribs of the mountain and its valleys and waterways leading into a plain covered with thousands and thousands of royal palms, set so far apart that you can distinguish every broad leaf and the full length of the white trunk. Among these are the red-roofed and yellow villages, and beyond them again the white line of breakers disappearing and reappearing against the blue as though some one were wiping out a chalk-line and drawing it in again, and then the great ocean weltering in the heat and stretching as far as the eye can see, and touching a sky so like it in color that the two are joined in a curtain of blue on which the ships seem to lie flat, like painted pictures on a wall. [Illustration: COURT-YARD OF A HOUSE IN CARACAS] You pass through clouds on your way up that leave the trees and rocks along the track damp and shining as after a heavy dew, and at some places you can peer through them from the steps of the car down a straight fall of three thousand feet. When you have climbed to the top of the mountain, you see below you on the other side the beautiful valley in which lies the city of Caracas, cut up evenly by well-kept streets, and diversified by the towers of churches and public buildings and open plazas, with the white houses and gardens of the coffee-planters lying beyond the city at the base of the mountains.