THE great llanos of Venezuela lie behind the wall of the Andes that begins at the Colombian border and swings in a long arc northeastward along the Caribbean coast. Sloping south and east into the basin of the Orinoco and its great tributaries, the Apure and Arauca, they comprise nearly half the total area of the country. They are almost level plains, covered with tall coarse grass, boundless as the sea. Thin strips of tropic forest follow the banks of the innumerable rivers that have cut deep gashes in the sandy soil. In the long rainy season the rivers rise and flood the plains, converting them into shallow trackless oceans dotted with little islands of green moriche palm like coral atolls. It is the cattle country of Venezuela.
In the days of Bolívar, the llanos were inhabited by vast herds of wild cattle and wild horses and by semisavage men--pardos, mestizos, zambos, mulattoes, blacks and Indians. Living their lives on horseback in a land that was flooded half the year, the llaneros were "half centaur, half alligator." Their diet was entirely meat, dried in the sun and carried in strips under the saddle to be salted by the horse's sweat.
Slaves, mostly, of the absentee owners of the land and cattle, the llaneros were nevertheless singularly independent and self-sustaining. It was not an uncommon thing to find white freemen under the despotic rule of a negro slave who had risen to the position of overseer of an "hato," sheerly through physical prowess. Their problems of existence extremely simplified, they were ignorant of