The Lost Steps

A disillusioned musicologist, fleeing his hollow modern life, travels to South America and up a great river into the jungle in search of primitive instruments, and finds a world outside time before losing the way back to it. Carpentier maps the real journey up the Orinoco: the Latin American capital of Caracas, the river port of Puerto Ayacucho, the great river climbing into the Guiana highlands, and the deep forest of the tepuis where a settlement seems to exist before history itself.

The musicologist

Caracas (the modern city)

The departure

The weary musicologist, sickened by the mechanical, inauthentic life of the modern city, comes to the South American capital ostensibly to collect primitive instruments for a museum. A sudden revolution in the streets, and the pull of the vast continent beyond, set him on the journey that will carry him out of his own time.

The opening

explicit The journey begins in a Latin American capital drawn from Caracas, where the narrator arrives from his hollow northern life and is caught up briefly in a revolution; the real city is the threshold of his descent into the continent.

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