Nothing can be finer than the ride to Caracas by the old Spanish road, or more superb than its position in a magnificent valley, watered by four rivers, surrounded by a rampart of lofty mountains, and enjoying, by reason of its altitude, a climate of perpetual spring.  But the city itself wore an aspect of gloom and desolation.  Four years previously the ground on which it stood had been torn and rent by a succession of terrible earthquakes in which hundreds of houses were levelled with the earth, and thousands of its people bereft of their lives.  Since that time two sieges, and wholesale proscription and executions, first by one side and then by the other, had well-nigh completed its destruction.  Its principal buildings were still in ruins, and half its population had either perished or fled.  Nearly every civilian whom I met in the streets was in mourning.  Even the Royalists (who were more numerous than I expected) looked unhappy, for all had suffered either in person or in property, and none knew what further woes the future might bring them.

CHAPTER VIII.

IN THE KING’S NAME.

I put up at the Posado de los Generales (recommended by the commandant), and the day after my arrival I delivered the letters confided to me by Senor Moreno.  This done, I felt safe; for (as I thought) there was nothing else in my possession by which I could possibly be compromised.  I did not deliver the letters separately.  I gave the packet, just as I had received it, to a certain Senor Carera, the secret chief of the patriot party in Caracas.  I also gave him a long verbal message from Moreno, and we discussed at length the condition of the country and the prospects of the insurrection.  In the interior, he said, there raged a frightful guerilla warfare, and Caracas was under a veritable reign of terror.  Of the half-dozen friends for whom I had brought letters, one had been garroted; another was in prison, and would almost certainly meet the same fate.  It was only by posing as a loyalist and exercising the utmost circumspection that he had so far succeeded in keeping a whole skin; and if he were not convinced that he could do more for the cause where he was than elsewhere, he would not remain in the city another hour.  As for myself, he was quite of Moreno’s opinion, that the sooner I got away the better.

“I consider it my duty to watch over your safety,” he said.  “I should be sorry indeed were any harm to befall an English caballero who has risked his life to serve us and brought us such good news.”

“What harm can befall me, now that I have got rid of that packet?” I asked.

“In a city under martial law and full of spies, there is no telling what may happen.  Being, moreover, a stranger, you are a marked man.  It is not everybody who, like the commandant of La Guayra, will believe that you are travelling for your own pleasure.  What man in his senses would choose a time like this for a scientific ramble in Venezuela?”