THE LAKE OF LEISURE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22220, 24 March 1934, Page 4

THE LAKE OF LEISURE

PHILOSOPHY OF MARACAIBO " Men of Maracalbo." By Jonathan Norton Leonard. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. (16s net.) Maracaibo is a lake which is not a lake. " It is a sort of sac like the stomach of a sea-slug. The mouth opens on the Caribbean —rbattleground of the races. Once in a century a vacuum develops within. The mouth sucks, and into the sac rush the people dominant outside. They may be Mayas, Spaniards or Americans. Then digestion begins. From the jungle shores exudes a sort of gastric juice. A juice made of music, sun, the laughter of girls, green leaves, hot blood, and rum. The lake will rest for a time—like an anaconda digesting a faun. Theniit will resume its old life under the while peaks of the Andes." The invasion of which Jonathan N. Leonard writes in " Men of Maracaibo" was that of big business, for oil was found on the shores of the lake, and even beneath its placid waters:— Down from Mexico they came, and from Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and California. Wild tropical bums, adventurous geologists, bewildered clerks, rough-neck drillers, and business magnates as rapacious as that other Morgan, the pirate, who'd paid his visit some centuries before. The whole State of Zulia was floating in oil. You needed only to punch a hole in the ground and it would spout the black wealth which made you king. Came the depression, and the boom in Maracaibo died, but the Venezuelans seem to have cared little. While the money flowed in and the oil out, they made the Americans welcome to their own peculiar diversions, and afforded them the civilised amenities they expected: "A very humble house earned more rent in a few months than it had cost to build. Taxis cost five dollars an hour. . . . Au American newspaper appeared, and an American beauty shop for sun-worn wives." A few of the invaders stayed on—prospectors and drillers, one or two realists who were prepared to exchange tiled bathrooms and modern kineina palaces for the peace of a 6unny land which the depression forgot to hit—or if it did, no one noticed it much. It is of the rise and decline of Maracaibo as a modern industrial district that MiLeonard writes. His book, however, is very different from a paean in praise of industrialism and efficiency. The giant derricks of the oil companies : swing, upward against an indifferent, glamorous scene peopled by dark-skinned reactionaries and philosophers. Perhaps the Venezuelan pries.t whom Mr Leonard met in La Ceiba, during a leisurely tour of the lake in a more than leisurely steamboat, may be allowed to explain that philosophy. The Americans, said the priest, believe that they have important work to do," and bustle about doing it; the English hurry because it is natural to them to assert themselves as rulers of the earth. " And the Venezuelans?" Says the priest:— We seldom hurry, because we have no really deep faith in efficiency. Our working people want nothing more than food, sleep, and love. Our upper classes are moved by pride, not directly by greed, as yours are. Our intellectuals—there are very few—are generally lost in theories. Our merchants do not matter..

They are not the important class they are in your country. So none of us hurry much. Our government hurries least of all, for it is a government of military men, and they never hurry except when they are fighting.'

It is best left to Mr Leonard himself, however, to expound a way of life that is much closer to Nature than the restraint of law and morality would permit the West; and to give the reasons why the Motilone tribe of Indians were left severely alone by the oil men, though their preserves are swimming with petroleum; and to describe the manner in which a man may wrest a living from the jungle without wrestling. Mr Leonard is a most agreeable guide, for those who are not shocked by hearty paganism, and his style will engage all admirers of the works of Mr Hemingway. • J. M.