El viaje de Himilcón / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Himilco’s Journey

     The squadron’s admiral stepped into the temple. He was worn out from the tribulations of the journey. He was coming to carry out the vows enunciated, under danger, in an unknown sea. At his side he carried the volume where he had consigned the navigation’s portents. He placed it in the hands of the priest, whom he approached modestly and with dignity, preparing him with a reverence. That tale would have to be inscribed, with a chisel, at the foot of the country’s idol, in honor of the maritime city.
     The ships would reach port broken and uninhabited. The sailors became scarce amid a continuous sea, close to the abyss, at the edge of the world.
     Some of them received loathsome burial in the heart of the waters. Many lost their lives under the effluvium of a morbid sky, and their souls lament the ground of the native country from an ignored coast.
     The survivors sighted, on the sunset path, the kingdom of the afternoon, islands fenced by wonders, and discovered the refuge of the sun, exhausted farmer.
     Some barbarians captured on the continent, pilots of dismasted ships, spoke marvels of their visit to a warm country, beyond the vespertine mirage; and those men of fierce semblance and grey eyes, raised under a furtive sun, motivated with their insidious fables the beginning of the return.




La torre de Timón (1925)




{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }