The Western City

The mountains and jungles divide the colony, but before the land on the other side becomes too distant for the Vice-Regent to maintain control, there is a caldera, set between the mountains on close side and unbroken jungle on the far.

Within that caldera is where an odd sort of town has arisen. Against threats coming from the open sea, it is shielded by a narrow strait, and a lightning storm which seems to have broken out shortly after the arrival of the first explorers, to the bafflement of scholars of mundane and arcane alike.

Lightning over Lake Maracaibo, photographed by one Fernando Flores.

A traveller to pass by boat through both – for indeed, to arrive at the western city, any route but by boat would be an excess of labor and time – would enter a maze of mangroves opening into a large, lake-like basin, then to see how the stilt-houses of the frogs coalesce into a settlement of a clearly urban nature. This, rightly, is the western city of the colony, in submission to the Vice-Regents, yet aside in many ways. The city itself was founded by settlers, but these early ones had more in common with recent migrations than with the settled folk of the colony, though by now that would be hard to tell. Frogs live there in great numbers, but even frog people here are not like those further east, urban, and boastful, and rash, instead of rural and composed. There is no star-fort to protect the city, and some of these traits have been surmised to be a result of that, a need to stay on the lookout and a readiness for combat. Perhaps, for these issues are always much debated.

“The Pitch Lake”, by Michel-Jean Cazabon (1857). This is a depiction of a natural deposit of asphalt, specifically the La Brea Pitch Lake, in Trinidad and Tobago.

The city lives off trade, and much of it is a typical trade of plantation wares, and some of the produce of the mines which lie closer to this side of the mountains, but not all, for there is great wealth in the tar, and oil, and pitch. Swamps around the lake abound in tar pits, and the oils secreting from below the ground are drawn out by buckets and by hand-pumps. With so many crafts drawing benefit from it, the demand for rock oil is always high, and the oil flows through the city in open drains, from the pits to the distilleries and to the port itself. The locals often find uses for it that elsewhere would demand for a different kind of oil or fat, and the city is lit with rock oil lamps. For now, the export fees are paid.

The same pitch lake as photographed in 2016, by one Grueslayer @Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. The properties of pitch were well-recognized by the Indigenous peoples long before the Spanish came.

This apartness protects the city from the wider colonial politics, but a sense of coming change is in the air. Already the tar pits are beginning to see visits from foreign mining experts, ever more frequent, and agents of companies owning the mines uphill are flocking to them. Miners from abroad, or even just from the mining towns of the mountains, are supplanting the locals in the pits, methods ever much distinct to the old way are suggested to improve the production. For now, it is gradual, but a sense remains that the standard operating modes are about to change.