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The whole population, in picturesque costumes, were filling huge baskets with the clusters, and snatches of their merry songs came pealing down to the coche d'eau, as it quietly crept along.
Riding in the coche is still one of the cheapest forms of convenience and entertainment in the city, excepting the afternoon drive around the Prado and the Malecon. That is not cheap. We used to pay a dollar an hour. My last experience cost me three times that. Much of the old city is now devoted to business purposes, wholesale, retail, and professional.
If a part of the continent has been overwhelmed by the ocean on the north of the peninsula of Araya it is probable that the enormous shoal which surrounds Cubagua, Coche the island of Marguerita, Los Frailes, La Sola and the Testigos marks the extent and outline of the submerged land.
The position of Macanao and that which I have assigned to the east point of the island of Coche, differ only four seconds in time, from the results obtained by M. Fidalgo. There being little wind, the captain preferred standing off and on till daybreak. We passed a part of the night on deck. The Guayqueria pilot conversed with us respecting the animals and plants of his country.
A bloated carcass of a dog lay lolled on bladderwrack. Before him the gunwale of a boat, sunk in sand. Un coche ensablé Louis Veuillot called Gautier's prose. These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here. And these, the stoneheaps of dead builders, a warren of weasel rats. Hide gold there. Try it. You have some. Sands and stones. Heavy of the past. Sir Lout's toys.
The water is less deep than in the northern passage, which is much narrower; but there is no risk of touching the ground, if vessels keep very close to the island of Lobos and the Moros del Tunal. The channel between Coche and Margareta is narrowed by the shoals off the north-west cape of Coche, and by the bank that surrounds La Punta de los Mangles.
The Guayquerie Indians and, generally speaking, all the inhabitants of the coast of Cumana and Barcelona, are imbued with an idea that the water of the shoals of Marguerita and the Testigos diminishes from year to year; they believe that, in the lapse of ages, the Morro do Chacopata on the peninsula of Araya will be joined by a neck of land to the islands of Lobos and Coche.
That evening the party reached the banks of one of the canals which connected the rivers of France, and which was to convey them to the Loire and thence to the Rhone, in a huge flat-bottomed barge, called a coche d'eau, a sort of ark, with cabins, where travellers could be fairly comfortable, space where the berlin could be stowed away in the rear, and a deck with an awning where the passengers could disport themselves.
A story similar to the above, and equally moral, is that of Cartouche, who, in company with two other gentlemen, robbed the coche, or packet-boat, from Melun, where they took a good quantity of booty, making the passengers lie down on the decks, and rifling them at leisure.
A Yankee named Stubbs is chief engineer. Sam is shipping Jamaica niggers for firemen." No schoolboy out for a holiday could have been half so keen to be free as I was. At the wharf I picked up a coche and was driven to the Tivoli, the hotel in the American quarter where our party was staying. The mud and the mosquitoes of former years were gone, though the natives were as indolent as ever.
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