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Title: El Toro
A motor car story of interior Cuba
Author: E. Ralph Estep
Release date: June 18, 2025 [eBook #76338]
Language: English
Original publication: Detroit, MI: Packard Motor Car Company, 1909
Credits: The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EL TORO ***
[Illustration: “_Many of the mountain passes were so narrow ... that we
were forced to run with one wheel on a sloping side wall and the other on
the crest of the deepest rut._”
SEE PAGE 78.]
EL TORO
A MOTOR CAR STORY
OF INTERIOR CUBA
BY
E. RALPH ESTEP
DETROIT
PACKARD MOTOR CAR COMPANY
1909
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Copyright, 1909
BY PACKARD MOTOR CAR COMPANY
Printed by
THE MATTHEWS-NORTHRUP WORKS
Buffalo
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
“Many of the mountain passes were so narrow ... that we were
forced to run with one wheel on a sloping side wall and
the other on the crest of the deepest rut,” FRONTISPIECE
“Once in awhile a good sort of winding dirt road gave promise
of speed,” 10
“Insular urchins, partly curious and partly fearful, were
half-hidden in the doorways,” 22
“Everywhere was stone.... Each mile was gained by defiant effort,” 22
“A hill like a natural stairway of great, rough limestone steps,” 28
“The clearance of an ox cart is thirty-eight to forty-eight inches,” 32
“At Jaruca, the whole town joined us at luncheon,” 32
“Through the clear rippling water of this first river the car shot
with a great splurge,” 36
“We drove under the everlasting palms and among boulders half-hidden
in the luxuriant grass,” 44
“On these ruts we tore tires off the wheels at two miles an hour,” 56
“We enjoyed the rare experience of ‘beating it,’” 56
“Palm trees by the thousand, and, scattered among them, small ponds
made by heavy rainfall,” 62
“The car looked like some big black beast, wallowing along in
boundless marsh,” 62
“The valley became muddier and muddier,” 68
“The sun’s farewell glance spread a woven gold mantilla on the
naked shoulders of a grim, forbidding world and the motor car
sank, helpless, into the mud as if, also, its day was done,” 68
“A river would be reached by following down a tortuous pass,” 74
“We had to ford ... a fast flowing torrent set down in a gorge
... which had no path leading to a crossing of any kind,” 82
“Digging to obtain a footing for the wheels in the roughest ravines,” 90
“At last we found the promised highway,” 100
“The oldest cathedral in Cuba, weatherbeaten, but proudly rising
over the low tiled houses of the town,” 100
PREFACE
Occasionally business has experiences which are interesting on their own
account. To set them down in words is an agreeable task and entirely
different from the making of business literature of the familiar kinds.
This narrative is just the relation of what happened, when, on other
business bent, we strayed into the unknown and stayed to have a motoring
experience, which was far enough from the conventional to deserve a place
in the realm of adventure. The tale is here recounted in the hope that it
will possess for others a degree of the interest which, for ourselves,
has made it a substantial part of our recollections. Most of all, ye
unworthy scribe hopes that the narration will be acceptable to those
who made it possible—to Sidney D. Waldon, father of the great idea and
leading spirit of the enterprise resulting therefrom, Edwin S. George,
Fred Crebbin and Rogelio Gaarken.
E. R. E.
Detroit, April, 1909.
[Illustration: “_Once in a while a good sort of winding dirt road gave
promise of speed._”
SEE PAGE 20.]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER I
_Direct not him, whose way himself will choose;_
_’Tis breath thou lack’st, and that breath wilt thou lose._
—Richard II.
[Illustration]
Red and vivid against the dense night, a camp fire of palm bark flared,
fluttered, and went out. Its momentary glare illumined one of those
strange scenes, occasioned by strange people being marooned in a strange
place. The rest of the world, which seemed very far away, was shut out,
on the one side, by a reef of palm trees sharply silhouetted against the
somber sky and, on the other, by a barrier of hills.
“Are we up against it?” Crebbin spoke.
“If you mean by ‘it’ that hill yonder, we are.” Waldon answered.
Three jaded men sat around the fire. Like the fire, their conversation
had flamed and gone out. They gazed into the darkening embers, mused on
the strangeness of some things and speculated on the final solution of
the problem which was theirs by reason of their present whereabouts. A
palm tree, which had never before enjoyed the company of a four-wheeled
vehicle, stood sentinel over an automobile, from whose tonneau protruded
the feet of a folded and, presumably, sleeping figure. On a bed of
brush slumbered the only one of the party who was native to the country
and thereby accustomed to its lack of things comfortable. The others
had abandoned this bed on which they could not sleep, had scoured the
unfamiliar woods for fuel and had amused themselves by keeping an
unnecessary fire ablaze, for the mere companionship of its warmth and for
its light, which drove away the trepidation of loneliness. There was no
noise, except the strange sounds from the underbrush and palm forests.
The strangers were ourselves. The native was our interpreter.
We were thirty miles from Havana, Cuba. In our sleepy thoughts, Cuba was
a mighty big place, Havana far away and our own homes as distant and
chimerical as the moon. The moon did not shine on that part of Cuba that
night. We were a discouraged bunch, with only a few stars on which to
hang our sense of location. Our hopes were in cold storage. We marveled
at the wildness of a land that was figuratively but a few steps from the
gay and careless Havana. We laughed hysterically at the recollection of
our day’s performance in bringing the car over the roadless country whose
stone trails are followed only by ox carts and ponies.
Remembering we were bound across the island to one of the oldest of its
very old towns, we realized that, when dawn should raise the curtain
on the scene night had shut out, we would be almost up against the
impossible. However, we did not seek to pry into the future. We simply
tried to neglect it. We were not sure where we were and we did not care
very much, because it made no difference. It was just about as hard to
get into and out of one place as another. We had learned much about Cuba
in a few hours.
We imitated sleep with apathy. Occasionally, we tried to bring the real
world back to us, by noisily gathering more fallen palm bark for the
fire. Palm bark makes a poor fire for the cheering of lonely spirits. It
is a fickle stimulant, the effect being great while it lasts, but it does
not last long enough to give any real comfort. The dead, dark, cold night
was depressing.
We were startled like children when the thundering of near-by hoofs awoke
us to the fact that we were no longer alone. The insurgents were busy in
Cuba just then and we had not been there long enough to learn that Cuba
and insurgents are not bad, but just naughty. The disturbers were as
surprised as we. One was a country doctor who was riding miles to visit a
stricken “spiggotie” in some distant hut.
A spiggotie is any kind of a provincial Cuban, when mentioned by an
outsider. He is one of that species of uncertain race which populates
the Spanish-American countries and makes it difficult for a visitor to
draw a color line between negro and Castillian blood. I have also met
spiggoties who were a charming mixture of Spanish, negro, and Chinese.
The doctor looked down from his pony at us in wonder. His servant on
the other pony was alarmed. Presumably, he never had seen an automobile
before. Having lived in the midst of three or four puny wars and one
real one, he showed the common spiggotie attitude of being suspicious
of everything that was not Cuban and regular. The doctor gave us the
customary “que hay,” and we awakened the interpreter to say it back to
him.
A Cuban does not say much, but he uses a lot of words on the job and is
willing to put a highly dramatic touch to the most trivial question or
remark. Our interpreter was fully impressed with the honor of being a
part of the first automobile expedition across the rough provinces of
Cuba. The rattle of Spanish was like two kettle drums in action together.
Evidently, the doctor asked all that could be asked and the interpreter
told him more about us than we could have told him. We tried to break
into the conversation, but the interpreter was disposed to consider our
assistance as a hindrance. We pried one unconsoling fact out of him.
The doctor thought we were more than right in supposing we might be up
against it. He named about a hundred rivers and a thousand hills which
were impassable. He explained that the trail we were following did not
lead anywhere, that there was no trail which led anywhere and that there
was no road which could be followed. He said that we would have to go
back. Then he said that we could not go back. That we had come this far
seemed only to impress him with the fact that we must have dropped out of
a cloud or come in an airship. It was certainly impossible to make him
believe we had driven an automobile from Havana.
Thirty miles is a short distance for an automobile in some places.
Between Philadelphia and New York it is a matter of thirty minutes. It
had been a matter of five or six hours with us, there in Cuba. We were
glad to have the doctor go on his way, for we had heard enough about deep
rivers, steep hills, walls of rock, and crooked gullies. We wanted to
think about something else until daylight. At least we had rather think
about what had been than what was to come. It seemed strange that so much
could have happened in the last twenty-four hours.
There was an element of humor in our plight, but we were not in a
humorous mood. There was great beauty in the wild, dark night for those
who were used to the quiet, homespun nights of Wayne County, Michigan. We
knew that we were missing the enchantment of the hour, but we were not in
the mood to mind missing anything.
We were the victims of our own imagination rather than the victims of
circumstances. We had imagined that Cuba was a sort of national park with
an immense system of boulevards. There is one magnificent highway in
Cuba, fifty-two miles long, which reaches from Havana to San Cristobal.
In publicity it reaches around the world. It has been the course of
automobile road races. Automobile writers, attending said automobile
races, wrote columns about the beautiful Cubaland, in which the wandering
motorist from the north may drive as fast as he likes, while balmy
breezes blow across the palm-sentineled macadam. The government has
started a road from Havana eastward across the island. Some of this
has been surveyed, a little of it graded and it actually exists for a
half-dozen miles out of Havana. Down in Santiago province, General Wood
has built a road or two. The middle of the island is roadless. There is
no continuous travel by vehicle.
Havana presents a wrong idea of Cuba. It is a tourists’ town. It has
boulevards and carriages. Cuba has wandering trails and ox carts. No
four-wheeled vehicle is used outside the towns. Probably no vehicle of
any kind, unless in time of war, ever has made a continuous journey
across the island. The ox carts are for local travel. Cross country
travel is on foot or on ponies.
Yesterday, on the little coast steamer which carried us across the gulf,
we had discussed with eager expectance the fascinations of touring in
Cuba, as presented in the steamship company’s alluring pamphlets. We had
come south with a Packard car to run it fast and furiously for thousands
and thousands of miles under hot weather conditions. A Cuban on the
steamer listened while we recounted our plans for this great trying out
of the speed and endurance of our motor car. He asked us:
“Have you ever been in Cuba?” and, upon our negative reply:
“Do you really think you can drive an automobile through the interior of
Cuba?”
We assured him that we could drive one anywhere, but he merely laughed
and sauntered away to tell the other passengers what seemed to him to
be a funny story. Other Cubans talked to us. They were all iconoclasts
and some of them were plain “knockers.” At first we were insulted and
then our peace of mind was destroyed. Slowly, but surely, we approached
the truth. Everywhere we turned for a reassuring opinion concerning the
suppositious highways, we got the same answer:
“There are no roads; you can’t do it.”
They all explained the impossibility of traversing its valley lands and
mountain regions, of making even a most laborious way across the arroyos,
through the bridgeless rivers, over the barren stone, and in the wide
swamps. There are roads on the map. The maps were originally made by
Spaniards with a greater regard for neat drafting than the truth. It
is hard to find those roads on the earth. Their course occasionally is
marked by washouts.
We slept on the information but gained nothing. This day we had left our
cabins early, to catch the first morning glimpse of the beautiful harbor
of Havana. As we looked upon its blue shores, under the bluer sky, and
felt the charm of early southern morn, it seemed impossible that such a
most excellent place to come to could be without roads leading from one
beauty spot to another.
The original Cuban came along with a parting slam at our hopes. We were
saved from developing a streak of yellow by being carried to a close
view of the sunken “Maine.” While our little ship was at anchor, waiting
for the tender to land its passengers, we surveyed that unprecedented
monument resting in the middle of Havana harbor and our American blood
created a stubborn desire to conquer Cuba, roads or no roads, if it took
all the gasoline in the world and all the tires in Akron, Ohio.
We were whisked from dreamland into the confusion of the custom-house.
Meekly as possible, we suffered the high-handed tactics of the revenue
officers. These new Cuban officials, who used to be flunkeys in the
household of Spain, with their new freedom and their new uniforms, are
arrogant. Some day, if he has not already done so, an American chap, with
more valor than discretion, is going to jail for hitting one of them.
It is a land of mañana, these being the headquarters. You can do anything
to-morrow. All you can do to-day is to fume and go up to the Prado, where
there is a good street eating store, and get acquainted with café con
leche. Every addition to our list of Cuban acquaintances added further
proof of the impassability of the Cuban interior. It is easy to be bold
before the battle. We felt as bold as Moro Castle looked across the
bay, when we drove around the beautiful shore drive toward Camp Columbia
and for a wild, hilarious rush out on the wonderful San Cristobal road.
We rushed back again to Havana because we were eager to tackle the
impossible.
Two native sugar planters, who had grown white haired in middle Cuba,
were introduced to us at the Hotel Pasaje, as conclusive evidence that we
were venturing on a dangerous and incredible journey. We listened to them
while we changed our northern garb for clothes more suitable to the task
ahead of us. At the local garage, we engaged an interpreter, commonly
known as “Cuba.” He had had some experience as a chauffeur and was the
only person we could find who seemed to think there might be a chance
of getting beyond the eastern limits of the city. The proprietor of the
garage cheerfully assured us that we would never reach Matanzas.
So we left Havana.
Driving on the boulevard which sweeps around the harbor, it was
incredible that the ending should be a great desert of broken rock. We
did not speculate on the future, but were satisfied to rush over the
undulating macadam, rolling up an immense funnel of white dust which
spread clear to the tops of the regal palms along the roadside.
Our future was hidden by the hills in front of us. We did not care. It
was enough, just to dash at racing speed past little scarlet Edens among
the bright flambollan flowers, where the silver-tongued moscareta warbled
his southern song behind the leaves of the spreading laurel and the
merry tomequin answered from the majestic ceiba. It was enough, just to
fly past palm-thatched huts and wave at the insular urchins who, partly
curious and partly fearful, were half-hidden in the doorways. It was
enough, just to watch the little speck on the far hillside become a bold,
commanding block-house as we raced toward it. Block-houses are still
popular in Cuba. One meets up with a block-house on almost any hillside,
whether or not there is any apparent habitation in the region.
A few miles and it all ended. The boulevard became merely a long stretch
of rough white stones—a new generation of road in the making—level and
almost straight, but with no surface over the jagged rocks and no bridges
over the many streams. So we drove, part of the time over the rocks and
part of the time in the rut-worn gully below. It was hard going, but not
impossible. Anyway, it did not last long because this particular road
ceased entirely. We were in the middle of Cuba.
A mere path straggled over and among the hills and was lost in the
great patches of native rock. We began to take the country seriously.
Trepidation mingled with curiosity. Once in a while a good sort of
winding dirt road gave promise of speed, only to change, like a
dissolving lantern slide, to a staggering trail over the rocks or between
them. The stones increased in number and in size. Each occasional break
in the bumping, swaying, swinging, car-racking, tire-tearing progress
became shorter. We forgot the stately palms, the queer huts, and the
beautiful red flowers. We did not even hear the evening song of the many
birds.
[Illustration: “_Insular urchins, partly curious and partly fearful, were
half-hidden in the doorways._”
SEE PAGE 20.]
[Illustration: “_Everywhere was stone.... Each mile was gained by defiant
effort._”
SEE PAGE 23.]
Everywhere was stone. Even the rough fields were so littered with loose
rock that cultivation had not been tried. Each mile was gained by defiant
effort. We began to worry over the fact that, not only were the prophets
vindicated, but their prophecies had foretold worse conditions the
farther we went eastward. We thumped along to a deep valley from whose
bottom the sun had already fled and on whose far side a great bluff of
solid rock arose to dispute our way.
Night does not settle in Cuba as it does in New England. It snaps, or,
rather, day snaps into night. Twilight is not long enough to deserve
the name. The task of getting to the opposite crown of the valley was
too great for the few minutes of remaining daylight; so we camped. We
were not prepared for camping, because we had anticipated spending our
nights in villages or towns. We had learned a lot that afternoon and were
still growing in wisdom. We made particular note of the point that when
one is traveling through that country in a motor car his night stop is
invariably just exactly where he happens to be when the sun sets.
That was a wonderful night. It was dark when three of us, including the
interpreter, struck into the region of awesome shadows and shivering
noises, seeking habitation and food. We could see nothing. We simply
wandered and yelled to attract attention. Every time we sent a loud “que
hay” reverberating among the hills, we jumped at our own temerity. At
last a hound bayed in answer and a feeble light flickered far off, up in
the sky. We trudged up another hill toward it.
A gaunt, scraggy Cuban met us. We watched his long machete with
fascinated eyes, while the loquacious “Cuba” gave him a detailed account
of ourselves, in Spanish. The Cuban welcomed us to his home, a hut of
palm slabs roofed with thatch and floored with dirt. By the sinister rays
of a small oil torch, mother and children ate a meal of pottage. The
children cried and we gave them a few Spanish coins. Charity is cheap in
a country of depreciated silver.
We asked for water, and it was drawn from a pigskin. We asked for food,
and were told that on the next hill-top dwelt a Great Señor—one Govin,
owner of the big newspaper in Havana and who could speak English. We
matched coins to see who would venture back alone to the somewhat distant
camp with a bucket of water. Crebbin lost and trundled off into the
darkness, seeking the light of the bonfire, which furnished our only clue
to the whereabouts of headquarters.
Under the talkative guidance of our still wonder-struck Cuban friend,
we found the other house. The owner was brought out of bed to hear our
reason for being there. He was much interested and much surprised. He was
glad to give us food but he refused to be in a hurry. Also Señora, before
she started to the kitchen to get us guinea hen and yams, insisted that
the strange tale be repeated to her.
The house of Govin was high above the surrounding country, but there was
nothing to see in the darkness and nothing to hear except the barking of
dogs and the echoing sounds from distant woods.
Across the front of the low, board house ran a long porch. So closely
framed it was in shrubbery, and so dense was the night packed around
it, that there was almost the privacy of a room. The master, in his
half-attire of white linen, kept up a running fire of conversation,
partly in Spanish through and to the interpreter, and partly in English.
Highly interested, but, for the most part, quiet, were the several
laborers who shared the hospitality of the porch. Occasionally they
interjected rapid exclamations and questions in Spanish. It was hard to
concentrate upon Señor Govin and our conversation.
The curiousness of the situation had unraveled my nerves. Never before
had it seemed possible that a person could be so comparatively close to
accustomed things and yet be so isolated. The whole scheme was like a
bunch of dramatics grabbed from a play or torn from a copyrighted novel.
Persons who are not used to prowling about the back yards and blind
alleys of the world find it hard to adjust themselves to strange society,
except in the broad light of day.
Probably the two at the roadside camp a mile away, and the one struggling
along the hilly trail with a bucketful of water, felt the impressiveness
of the night as much, or more, than we who sat on the Govin porch and
talked with the Govin family.
It was a romantic situation until Govin, innocently desiring to please,
cracked the grandeur of the night and pierced the helpless heavens by
turning on the rusty voice of a battered ten-dollar phonograph.
Finally, we ate our delayed supper at our own fireside. We were not yet
sleepy. The food and warmth cheered us, for although the days be hot in
Cuba, the nights are cold. Twenty-four hours had not acclimated us to a
change of fifty degrees in the temperature with the setting of the sun.
Then began our vigil.
Thirty miles back of us lay Havana with its gay opera, its bright cafés,
and its dirty hotels, swarming with tourists. Thirty miles back lay a
world’s city, known to the world, close to the rest of the world, and
familiar to the world as any other capital. Thirty miles back lay our
expectations, our fancies, and our nerve. Thirty miles back lay the
things we knew. This was unknown wilderness.
Havana to Camp Solitude—thirty miles.
[Illustration: “_A hill like a natural stairway of great, rough limestone
steps._”
SEE PAGE 30.]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER II
_Your isle, which stands_
_As Neptune’s, ribbed and paled in with rocks unscalable._
—Cymbeline.
[Illustration]
Second-hand breakfasts, made from the ruins of supper, are never
pleasant. It is less pleasant to meet the cold, damp, gray dawn without
even the satisfaction of awakening from sleep. Our second morning in
Cuba,—we stolidly watched the dark sky turn into tawny streaks and
gradually brighten into daylight. We ate a few crackers and gnawed at
a few left-over guinea hen bones, with tea, brewed in a tin cup, for
a chaser. We were impatient for the sun to drive the chill out of the
morning and out of our bones.
Now we faced the toughest proposition we ever had met; so we dodged
it. Easier than trying to climb the bluffs that blocked the way was a
circuitous route over the top of a wind-blown, grass-covered hill in
somebody’s field. We broke down the stone fence, drove the car through,
and dashed over these fields, skipping from one hill to another. At last
we brought up at the back door of the house of Govin. He gave us advice
and bananas, both of which we swallowed as fast as we could.
Bananas in Cuba are fine; advice is poor. We were in the center of
a magnificent panorama of hills, very green, and fringed with palms
that reached the horizon and seemed to be everlasting. Señor Govin had
selected his home well. It was a beautiful and wonderful country. Also,
it was the third of January and the now scorching sun had warmed us to
the continuance of our fight against the rocks. Courage had returned
and we were willing to accept whatever Cuba had to offer in the way of
highway difficulties.
What happened the day before we forgot. There is no time to remember,
when journeying as we journeyed. The new difficulties are so rapidly
encountered that each experience wipes out the recollection of the
previous one. With a good-bye from Señor and a smiling adios from Señora,
we ran down a long, clay-covered lane to the stone-floored valley, which
was the only road there was to follow. That day we took the measure of
our ability to strike the first two letters off the word impossible.
We discovered a new kind of hill—a hill like a natural stairway of great,
rough limestone steps. It was steep enough to be an almost impossible
climb, even had it been smooth. At the left was a deep gorge on whose
bottom wound the rusty rails of the Havana Central. On the right was a
plowed field, crossed by gullies and covered with stones.
[Illustration: “_The clearance of an ox cart is thirty-eight to
forty-eight inches._”
SEE PAGE 33.]
[Illustration: “_At Jaruca, the whole town joined us at luncheon._”
SEE PAGE 38.]
Stones, by the way, do not affect agriculture. The soil grows its crop
whether cleared of stones or not. They hitch a squad of bulls onto a plow
and literally rip up the face of the earth. Then they plant sugar cane.
After a while they come around with machetes and cut it down. Next they
load it, in half-ton bunches, on ox carts and haul it to the mill. If the
roads become worse, by the deepening of the immense ruts, they put on
higher wheels and more oxen.
The clearance of an ox cart is thirty-eight to forty-eight inches. When
it is wet the carts sink into the earth up to the hubs. They travel in
groups, so that when an extremely bad place is reached, the oxen from
several carts may be hitched onto each cart in succession. It takes from
four to twelve oxen to pull an ordinary cart.
We surveyed that particular hill from all angles, reconnoitering the
railway track, the fields, and the hill itself. A native, who happened
along, showed us how to cut off the tail of a scorpion with a machete
so that he becomes a safe companion. There are scorpions under most of
the rocks and there are lots of rocks. Centipedes are correspondingly
numerous. We climbed the hill itself, filling the jutting surfaces of
the step-like rocks with loose stones and, then, driving up the rough,
perilous incline by sheer power.
Next we found that getting down the opposite side of some of these
stepped hills was likely to be harder than getting up. They are so steep
that the car slides with the wheels locked. Once we had to fasten a rope
to the rear end of the car, give it a couple of turns around a palm tree
and let the car go bumping down, a yard at a time. At one place we were
lucky enough to find a couple of planks which had been used to bridge a
shallow creek, so we drove down the hill by using the planks for skids
from one step to the next.
Our first ford was a wide, shallow stream with a hard rock bed. Through
the clear rippling water of this first river the car shot with a great
splurge and spreading of white spray. We had dreaded the rivers which had
been pictured to us as impassable. By this stream was a country grocery,
in front of which lounged a rural guard. We asked him if this was a
typical river. He laughed and started to tell us about deep torrents
that flowed over beds of stone, between wall-like cliffs. We changed the
subject and dickered with him for his machete, with which he claimed to
have killed seven Spaniards during the last war.
Rural guards are near soldiers. They get more money than United States
regulars and wear better clothes, with celluloid collars that are wiped
clean every day. They carry machetes and revolvers. They will sell either
or both. They ride good ponies and go to country dances. They are not
impressive.
[Illustration: “_Through the clear rippling water of this first river the
car shot with a great splurge._”
SEE PAGE 34.]
The route continued an interesting one. There are more kinds of trail in
a half day’s journey in Cuba than there is in going from Hell’s Gate to
the Golden Gate. A comparatively level stretch of red dirt, strewn with
boulders, suddenly leaves off in a tract of grass where the route is
marked only by stone fences. Where the red soil is hard, the travel is
not extremely difficult, the principal obstruction being loose stones,
which must be dodged. The same dirt, soaked up by a heavy rain, becomes
a bottomless mire. In some places there is nothing to follow but a path
through high-growing sugar cane. In other places, unless the ground is
seamed with deep ruts by the continuous travel of heavy ox carts in wet
weather, the only thing which signifies a traveled path will be the
country stores. Some of these are in board houses. Most of them are
merely thatched huts. They all keep a little supply of vile liquors and
canned meats. At some of them it is possible to buy oranges and bananas.
During those scorching days, with infrequent opportunities to get good
drinking water, we quenched our thirst with the juice of many oranges.
They are little ones, but cheap and good. We bought them by the dozen and
threw them loosely into the folded top, back of the tonneau. Bananas we
ate immediately upon purchase. The tree-ripened bananas of Cuba are very
thin skinned and delicious, but one hour in the sun spoils them.
Our second morning’s work, to relate, would appear to be the tale of a
long journey. As a matter of fact, we laboriously worked our way over the
rocks for a few miles to Jaruca, where we stopped for lunch. Jaruca was
our first interior village. We had passed no towns since leaving Havana.
We got our initial experience of a typical inland meal and started in
learning to like the peculiar style of cooking which is partly Spanish,
partly devilish, and ninety-five per cent. grease.
The main thing to eat is a pottage of beans and meat, fried bananas and
chicken or guinea, cooked with rice. In the large towns or in places
near the rivers or along the coast, there is always fish. The bread is
good everywhere. It comes in small individual loaves and is so greatly
“shortened” that it needs no butter, which is a good thing. There is no
butter, except the canned stuff shipped in from the United States. This
is impossible. It looks like melted vaseline. We did not taste it.
At Jaruca, the whole town joined us at luncheon. Only those who had
been to Havana had seen an automobile and some of them had never heard
of one. They were all timid. In addition to which, we were Americans.
The interior Cubans have a very sensible respect for los Americanos.
They are frank in their inspection of a stranger. At the café, where
we sat at a corner table almost on the sidewalk, we were surrounded by
the closely packed populace, that carefully examined our make-up, from
toes to turbans, and discussed us in Spanish. Those who did not stick by
us during the meal clustered about the car. Hunger is a preventive of
embarrassment. Besides, we broke even with the town by scaring it out of
its wits with an exhibition of fast and fancy driving on the way to the
edge of the village.
That afternoon we made good use of our hatchet. Many times there would
be several drops, or great depressions, in the rock and at each place
we would have to cut down underbrush alongside the path that we might
get around the hole. Much of the driving was in deep trenches where the
travel of many ox carts had worn the ruts into a ditch. For hundreds of
yards we drove between these close walls of dirt, where the grass-covered
ground, on either side, rose higher than the car. This ditch, winding
past rows of huts in which lived sugar plantation laborers, debouched now
and then into open territory, where the road was any feasible way among
the shrubs, rocks, palms, and ruts.
We began to tire under the hard work and were glad that the sun was
sinking rapidly toward the line of hills back of us. We hoped to reach
suitable shelter before dark, for we needed a night of real sleep. We
struck the first river of consequence, and one of us waded through it to
find out where and how we might cross. It was not difficult, but this was
not the region of rivers. We had yet to cross the ones of which we had
been warned.
Rivers down there are both a blessing and a curse. They stop traffic and
they stop thirst. There are but few wells. We struck one artesian well
which supplied water for many square leagues. A league, incidentally, has
its own meaning, being a colloquial measure of about a mile and a half,
instead of the usual three miles implied by the marine kind. Most of the
drinking water comes from the rivers. It is carried away in cans or water
jars. The former are principally five-gallon kerosene cans saved for the
purpose. It is not very good water and, unless obtained at a store, is
given one to drink from a porron.
A porron is a Spanish-made clay bottle with an opening at the top,
through which to fill it, and a small nozzle on one side, through which
to empty it. The use of the porron is the only visible evidence of
cleanliness on the island. It is against all etiquette and many rules to
touch the spout to the lips. You simply aim as well as you can and hit
your mouth as often as you can.
We ended our journey at Benavides. Benavides is a dot on the map. In
reality, it is a board hut, yclept grocery. We had fought our way
thirty-four miles. Hungrily impatient, we waited in the stone-flagged
main room of the house for a much-fried supper. We ate it by the glimmer
of a side lamp. Around the dirty table at which we sat, collected all
the inhabitants of the house, and a dozen others who must have lived
somewhere but who appeared and disappeared in a mysteriously dramatic
fashion.
It was a dismal meal and a poor one and we were cross. We were glad to
creep onto the wire spring cots which they spread for us in a partially
enclosed corner of the hut. That night we accrued some more wisdom about
touring in Cuba. We undressed, for we had not yet learned our part, but
that was the last time we were so foolish, except one joyous night when
we put up at a regular hotel in the real city of Santa Clara.
Each of us had, underneath, a wire mattress, and, on top, a starched
sheet. Cold air rushed through the meshes of the woven wire, for the
night was a chill one, while the starched sheet felt like the dank sides
of a sepulchre. Outside, innumerable pigs grunted between the several
acts of a protracted dog fight, and the chickens, which roosted in the
house, fluttered from one corner of the room to another; the many fleas
were still bolder.
There is an intimacy about living things in Cuba which is somewhat
appalling to a man who has been more or less used to picking his
associates, or, at least, his family. Cats, dogs, chickens, and pigs are
welcome in the household. The children sit on the floor and quarrel with
each other and with the dogs. It is not infrequent to find a hut which
has its household snake. There are no poisonous snakes on the Isle de
Cuba, but there is a large brand which looks as if it would like to be
poisonous if it knew how. Just as the family dog, in Illinois, protects
the house against burglars, so the family snake in Santa Clara Province
protects the house against rats—but this is not a tale of grewsome things.
Each successive night had its elements of humor, but that night at
Benavides we had not yet arisen to the greatness of mind and broadness of
character which permitted us to enjoy the humorous phases of the evening.
We rolled around on our cots to change the water marks which the wire
mattress made in our skin, and tried to sleep during the brief intervals
between occasions when it was necessary to awake and pull the sheets back
onto us. If all of the other fellows had the same shrinkage of the soul
which I experienced that night (and, out of fairness to myself, I think
they did), the expedition came awfully close to needing an epitaph.
Camp Solitude to Benavides—thirty-four miles.
[Illustration: “_We drove under the everlasting palms and among boulders
half-hidden in the luxuriant grass._”
SEE PAGE 50.]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER III
_The high palme-trees, with braunches faire,_
_Out of the lowly vallies did arise,_
_And high shoote up their heads into the skyes._
—Spenser.
[Illustration]
Heathen who worship the sun are not such bad philosophers, after all. For
the second time we learned that the bright sun changes the circumstances;
so we resolved to make our pluck last from sunrise to sunrise, instead
of from sunrise to sunset. We were sanguine travelers who set out from
Benavides to Matanzas, over a fairly good yellow clay road which lasted
only about one-third of the nine miles to Cuba’s show town at the head of
the Yumuri Valley. We gayly bid good morning to the familiar rocks.
Crossing them was not as hard work as it had been the first day. Places
which had puzzled and almost stumped us, we crossed with Icarian
abandon. Waldon, at the steering wheel, had learned new tricks of
acrobatic motoring and all of us had developed unexpected ingenuity in
makeshift road engineering. We did not waste any time in rolling away the
wrong rock or any other rock than the one whose removal was absolutely
necessary to make progress possible. We had developed a system of team
work and were able to go over these patches of rock at four or five miles
an hour where, previously, we had been able to make only two or three.
Coming to a place where there was a new road under construction, but not
far enough under to be used for motoring, we encountered the contractor
in charge of the grading. He was an English-speaking Cuban, who had
served time in the United States, and was greatly amazed at our approach.
The only way we could convince him that we had driven from Havana was by
pointing out that we could not have come from any other place. He seemed
to like us and so gave us all the information he had concerning the
impossibility of going any farther than Matanzas.
Every first-class city in Cuba has a road. It does not straggle out of
town. It darts straight into the country as though it intended to cross
the island. After a couple of miles it stops, as if the money had run
out, the mayor had died, or some other calamity had occasioned its sudden
ending. About six inches past the edge of the macadam there is likely to
be a deep morass, a bed of rocks that look as though they had been thrown
there from a volcano, or a great confusion of bottomless ruts. There is
no such thing as a compromise between the good and the bad. It is either
one or the other. We struck the good about the time we came within sight
of the cathedral towers of Matanzas.
It was quite a novelty to drive fast over the smooth macadam. We had
almost forgotten that we ever had been in any other country or that we
ever had driven an automobile fast enough to roll up dust. Passing a
beautiful cemetery with a magnificent wall and gateway, the interpreter
explained that it was possible for a Cuban town to maintain a beautiful
cemetery because it leases the lots instead of selling them, and the
income from the dead is fairly permanent. Edwin made a real joke, by
asking what they did with the dead beats who did not pay the rent.
An astonished rural guard, on the outskirts of Matanzas, was glad to drop
his duties and accompany us in the car to the center of town. He guided
us to the Grand Hotel Paris. That word “grand,” as applied to the Cuban
hotels, is a great deal like the word “best,” as applied to automobiles
in American advertising. There are so many Grand Hotels at which one
would not stop, except out of necessity, that the word has lost its
meaning. This one, however, was fairly deserving of the title and we were
immediately charmed with the clerk.
Rogelio Gaarken was his name, and he was the first Cuban we had met who
did more thinking than jabbering. “Cuba,” our original interpreter,
was to go back to Havana from here, so we shanghaied Rogelio, much
to the disgust of the proprietor, because this was the tourist season
and Rogelio was needed to bring down Havana’s overflow of sightseers
at eleven dollars per, guide to the Yumuri Valley and dinner, with a
thirty-cent bottle of wine, thrown in.
It was nine o’clock when we reached Matanzas and two o’clock when we
left. The visiting fever had struck us and we loitered away the hours
seeing some of the most convenient sights and adding to our stingy
supplies. We put in some groceries and road building hardware, including
a mattock.
A mattock is worth two dollars in Spanish money, but in usefulness it
is worth twelve shovels, six crowbars and three hatchets. The pick end
is the best mechanical substitute for dynamite, while the wide blade
on the other side can be used for anything from chopping out shale and
rock-like clay to peeling sugar cane for luncheon. We also purchased as
much gasoline as we could carry, for Matanzas is the only place in Cuba
where it is refined. Gasoline is an uncertain quantity down there. We
had got beyond being critical about the uncertainty of its quality. The
smallest town has kerosene and some of the country stores carry benzine.
Gasoline is only found in the larger cities, where the mayor or some
other dignitary owns a gasoline stove.
The government engineer of the Province of Matanzas gave us a blue print
showing the way we should go toward Santa Clara. After he had finished
his elaborate directions, he told us that it would be impossible to
travel that road. He said that we might go a little way but would soon
come to a river fifteen to twenty feet deep and a hundred yards wide. Our
only comment was:
“Adios.”
Jagged rocks had made our tires suffer and we were not well supplied with
extras. “Cuba,” returning to Havana, carried word to the garage there to
ship new tires to us at Santa Clara. As we followed the blue print out of
town, our conversation dwelt on the river.
Slowly and laboriously picking our way toward the wide, deep gorge in
which the dreaded stream itself was hidden, we schemed out a lot of
things that would have been a credit to Robinson Crusoe and other noted
performers of bogus engineering feats. Our favorite plan was an immense
raft of palm trunks, it being agreed that, if we worked all night, we
could probably get the raft ready to float by morning.
We came upon the river unexpectedly, our first intimation of its
whereabouts being three bare piers sticking above the bluff and telling
of the destructive march of Weyler through a province that once had
boasted a few century-old bridges. Then we saw the river. It was as dry
as the top of a hill, a fair sample of the many valleys floored with
nothing but rocks of volcanic roughness. It was marvelous that the tires
were not literally torn from the rims and that the twisted wheels and
groaning frame did not weaken under the strenuous task.
Having crossed so much rock, we argued that surely nothing worse could be
ahead. We began to gain confidence in ourselves and to lose confidence
in Cuban information. When the government engineer of a province did not
know that a river a few miles from his office was only full of water in
the wet season, we concluded that the mere prophecies of provincials were
not worth worrying about.
Ambling along until nightfall, we often crossed fields where it was
easier to take a roundabout way than to try to follow the trail. Slowly
we drove under the everlasting palms and among the boulders half-hidden
in the luxuriant grass. The war had bled fast and furiously around here.
Stone houses of the Spanish period all were gone or stood in ruins, dim
pages in the history of minor battles which never will be written. The
country had blossomed again. The red flambollan, the stately sugar cane,
and the fast-growing bananas had wiped the stain away, but thatch-roofed
huts replaced the old Spanish houses which once reared picturesquely in
wild regions.
For miles the road would be marked by wavering stone fences, but there
was nothing between these fences to show that it had been used since the
war or that it ever had been anything else than the rock-strewn virgin
soil. Sometimes the grass grew as high as the car. Sometimes the fences
would be long lines of palms, framing a magnificent vista of miles upon
miles that ended in the blue, blue hills at the horizon. Had there been a
road between these fences or between these palms, Mercury himself could
have asked no better speedway.
As the country became flatter, sugar plantations became larger and more
frequent. Now and then we would strike the railway, at a sugar mill
siding or where it passed through some village. We scared the whole
town of Limonar out of the lethargy into which it had sunk since the
war. Isolated and without excitement save local brawls, dances and cock
fights, the sudden bursting into its midst of a motor car, manned by
Americans, was like the bursting of the first bomb of another war. Having
stopped to buy oranges, the inhabitants—men, women, debutantes in sheath
gowns of the original pattern, and little children—chased us as far as
they could hold the pace. This was easy until we found a fairly level
field and drove out into the loneliness of vast country where there is
nothing except the rapid growth of wild plants and grasses.
Recklessly we drove through deep grass, among the burned houses and
ruined fences, always reminding us of the fact that we were probably the
first to follow across these provinces in wake of the devastating armies
of a decade past. Hidden in the grass were ruts that had been cut by
heavily loaded ox carts years before and which had hardened almost like
rock.
Eventually we arrived at Tosca, a handful of huts set in a bleak region
of grass, where there were not even palm trees to hide poverty and
desolation. We had ceased to ask if we might stay. We simply announced
ourselves and took what we could get. Here, it was a supper of our own
canned stuff, purchased at Matanzas; eggs which we bought of one of the
farmers at a dollar a dozen, and bread furnished by the hospitable family
which had nothing else to offer, except the use of their living room. We
ate by candlelight, under the curious gaze of astounded farmers, timid
women, and the frightened glances of little babies, who sat on the floor
and sucked sugar cane.
Every time we gathered, in the evening, around some Cuban farmhouse
table, we were impressed by the fact that our trip had two distinct
parts and was, in reality, two distinct journeys. One was a journey by
day, over a hard and trying land. The other was a journey by night,
into many peculiar places. By day, we worked and studied the country.
At night, we loitered and studied the people. Each day was complete in
itself. We never paid attention to what had passed or to what might come.
Perhaps, because we were tired, generally, it was easier than thinking,
speculating, or planning, just to sit among the Cubans and be interested
in them. Little things were mutually amusing.
The fact that we brewed tea in huge cups and drank it in huge, hot gulps
amused the Cubans. Courteously and gladly, they heated water and, then,
laughed to see us pour it on the little green leaves. On the other hand,
we were amused by the universal presence of sewing machines. The smaller
and meaner the hut, the more prominently loomed the sewing machine. The
real Cuban lives in almost squalor; dresses in almost rags. The squalor
is accented by the sewing machine. Ragged pants are sewed together and
patched, likewise.
The Cuban has a few passions. He gratifies these and does not give a rap
for anything else. The sewing machine is evidently one of the national
passions—carefully cultivated by the enterprising foreign department of
the sewing machine trust. But the greatest of Cuban passions is gambling.
The lid is on bull-fighting and cock-fighting in Cuba. It is a leaky lid.
When Saturday night comes, the ragged Cuban goes to a dirty corner in his
dirty hut, raises a dirty board and brings out a dirty bag, in which are
many dirty Spanish dollars. He places the bag carefully under one arm
and under the other, still more carefully, he places his favorite little
black rooster and starts off for the nearest cock pit. Money is merely a
medium of wager.
Our daily march was improving. We had gone forty-four miles.
That evening we spent rearranging our supplies and tools in the tousled
tonneau. Whatever we had that was not necessary we threw away, and placed
our road implements where they would rattle the least, knock our shins
the least, and yet be ready for instant use. Then we raised the top and
entertained each other with merry persiflage, until we were sleepy enough
to lay down in our clothes on benches within the hut and forget it.
Sleep was our greatest need. Shivering through long wakeful hours of
another night spent in our clothes, on hard boards, attacked by fleas,
and awakened by the clamor of yawling dogs and puling chickens, we found
a tonic in Rogelio, whom we called “Roe.” He was an excellent type of
that dark-hued, wiry Cuban, whose well-chiseled features and wonderful
black eyes are far superior to the alleged beauty of the Cuban woman.
Some of the mahogany-tinted country women have such eyes, but never
the señorita of the town. The latter is, in most cases, simply a human
synonym for talcum powder. I would like to corner the powder market in
Cuba.
Rogelio was quaint, as well as handsome. Some ancestor had been a
humorist and a philosopher. Rogelio became one of us. He made it easier
for us to look up at the dark, thatched roof and to fill our sleepless
moments with laughter instead of commiseration.
Benavides to Tosca—forty-four miles.
[Illustration: “_On these ruts we tore tires off the wheels at two miles
an hour._”
SEE PAGE 57.]
[Illustration: “_We enjoyed the rare experience of ‘beating it.’_”
SEE PAGE 58.]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER IV
_Magnum iter adscendo; sed dat mihi gloria vires._
—Propertius.
[Illustration]
All ruts, except those made by ox carts, are merely imitations. The
country through which we were passing soaks water like a sponge in the
wet season. It dries quickly. When the red soil is soft, the immense,
heavily-laden carts sink into and cut gashes three or four feet deep in
the face of the earth. These parallel, intersect, and cross one another.
There is only one way to drive a car over them; that is to always keep
the wheels on the high spots. Sometimes the high spot may be wide;
sometimes narrow as the wheel; sometimes it may be the sloping side of a
gully. On these ruts and on the rocks we tore tires off the wheels at two
miles an hour.
From Tosca to Macagua is sixty miles of ruts. As we left the region
where the road is over bare rock, we began to work into a region where
the ruts alternate with mud. For a short distance the ground had been
untraversed for a long time, and was hard and fairly smooth. We enjoyed
the rare experience of “beating it,” which down there meant eighteen to
twenty miles an hour. This respite from the usual difficulties was brief,
for the road finally became merely an opening between sugar fields.
The cane, sweeping the car on either side, rose far above our heads and
for many miles it was never possible to see in front of us farther than
a few hundred yards. Leaving the sugar cane for short drives over open
ground, we noticed that this must have been a particularly patriotic
section during the fighting with Spain. Most of the scattered houses were
of stone or boards, calcimined white, light blue, or yellow, and nearly
each one bore the roughly painted sign: “Viva Cuba Libre.”
Lunch was eaten in a street café at Colon, and while there we became
acquainted with the four-hundred of a typical inland city. Politicians
in such localities bear reputable names socially and lead the village
society. We needed gasoline and were told that there was a private supply
owned by a man who was then at the home of the mayor, on the outskirts,
where the beaux and belles of Colon had been invited to a dinner party by
his honor. We were asked to join the festivities, but excused ourselves
and took the oil monopolist back to the town that he might sell us one
of his precious ten-gallon cans of gasoline.
The people of the farms that we had met had been picturesque and
interesting. The social leaders of this small city were very ordinary
types in their commonplace imitation of American dressing. They are
uninteresting anomalies, striving for a conventionality of which they
know little. They have a color line which does not exist in the country.
Out among the hills, the only line of demarkation is the age limit above
which it is considered proper and right that little boys and little girls
should wear clothes.
We were now running comparatively near the railway and small stations
were frequent. To most of these, mahogany was being brought up from the
forests of the south, one immense log at a time being hauled on a cart
drawn by from four to a dozen oxen. The progress is about two miles an
hour when the road is not muddy.
More ruts, open fields covered with loose rocks, mud holes and, then,
Macagua, a town to remember. It boasted an hotel, which was club, general
store, saloon and salon to the village and surrounding country. We had
beds for the first time in Cuba, but our real experience that evening was
not in them. Being Sunday, it was a day of celebration.
There had been a baseball game in which the Pinks beat the Blues. Cuba is
baseball crazy. Each country team has dainty cotton-flannel suits, which
they put on after the game for the purpose of parading around the town.
There was a balloon ascension at dusk—a hot-air balloon of red, white,
and blue paper going up in flames. The star number on the program was the
evening dance. The orchestra, composed of the blackest of Cuban negroes,
came early with its kettle drums, cornet, clarinet, gourd and trombone.
The tunes were of local invention. A file drawn across the teeth gives
the same sensation as the rasping noise they made.
Local society took possession of the hotel floor. They danced a slow,
sleepy, never-ceasing, never-changing two-step. The black rabble stood
outside, watching the scene through open doors and windows. When each
dance was done, the couples marched around in an endless parade. Then
the young swains exchanged partners or managed to select the maidens of
their respective hearts’ desire. If a young man wanted a certain girl, he
grabbed her partner by the unengaged arm, made a few farcical bows, which
the grabbed party would duplicate and then withdraw, it being considered
highly improper to protest the transfer. By the way of an extra for the
edification of the entire party, the American embassy rang in a cake walk.
Our beds were on the balcony which surrounded the second floor of the
hotel building. We slept as men will who have not slept in four days.
Tosca to Macagua—sixty miles.
[Illustration: “_Palm trees by the thousand, and, scattered among them,
small ponds made by heavy rainfall._”
SEE PAGE 65.]
[Illustration: “_The car looked like some big black beast, wallowing
along in boundless marsh._”
SEE PAGE 65.]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER V
_... for now began_
_Night with her sullen wings to double-shade the desert._
—Milton.
[Illustration]
By its very monotony, human nature is disappointing. Interior Cubans
are guileless, frank, generous, meek, dirty, willing, and altogether
submissive and obedient. In other words, they are children. But a
community like Macagua has its four-flushers, its liars, and its cheats,
the same as London, New York, and Oshkosh. There had been at the dance
a man who said he lived some distance eastward, knew every foot of the
country and, on returning to his farm in the morning, would be glad to
show us the difficultly followed trail. We took him along.
It was very early in the morning and the sun was straight ahead, shining
into our eyes over the low mist which had not yet been dispelled. We ran
right from town into a great fen, where only a few stunted palm trees
rose above the vast ocean of rank guinea grass, covering invisible mires.
We could not see the wet places until we ran into them. Trying to get
around a deep mud hole, we bumped into a palm tree and had to cut it down.
Chopping a palm tree is like chopping steel tubing. A hundred glancing
blows of machete, mattock and axe leave a few scratches on the trunk
of the tree. It was while we were hacking away at this palm that our
volunteer guide informed us that we were lost. There is no definite road
through the tall grass which hides the treacherous swamps. The sun is the
best guide. We began to wish for the rocks that we had struggled over,
back in Matanzas Province. Our displeasure we vented on the unfortunate
fraud who had invented his guide story to obtain a ride in the wonderful
automobile from the United States. We were even disappointed that he
did not mind being left anywhere to walk back. Provincial Cubans do not
travel far from home, ever, but they will wander in any direction with
you and worry not at all about going back. The lack of palatable food is
about the same in one place as another, and the hut of one Cuban is about
as homelike as that of another, so they are seemingly indifferent to time
or place.
Sighting the railway, we decided to quit trying to follow the hidden
trail through the swamp and take to the right-of-way. Imagine running
along the worst railway roadbed of which you can think, just inside the
fence, regardless of grades, banks, or ravines. Imagine such a stretch
of road covered thick and deep with grass. For several leagues this is
what we had, until we struck a high plateau where there was no habitation
and no road—only palm trees, by the thousands, and, scattered among them,
small ponds made by heavy rainfall.
The grass was short. The sun scorched and there was nothing to drink. We
had forgotten to lay in our usual supply of oranges. We wandered about,
guided by the sun and trying to keep to the correct general direction.
Palm trees are not close together like the trees of a northern forest,
but at a certain distance their white trunks bank into a solid wall.
Always, it seemed, we were in the middle of a large, white-paled arena.
Here, also, Rogelio pointed out to us the flat-topped guao tree, which is
dreaded by the natives because of the popular belief that to rest in its
shadow means sleep and death.
After awhile we hit a sandy trail which had been the bed of some long
since dried-out river. It was seamed in a thousand directions by the
draining off of recent rains. We welcomed the approach of the first
person we had met since morning, a horse-back rider who appeared to be
honestly familiar with the country and who led us, once more, to the
trail we had lost. We encountered more tall grass. To a spectator, the
car must have looked like some big, black beast, wallowing along in
boundless marsh.
A deep blue ridge in the east betokened mountains. We were in a valley.
That afternoon we forded nine shallow rivers and rushed innumerable
short steep climbs up their farther banks. Some of these grades seemed to
stand the car on end, both going down and coming up. At many of them we
were forced to stop and cut out notches in the hard clay or solid rock,
to clear the fly wheel, when the car should go up over the sharp crown of
the hill.
At a small, isolated grocery store, where we stopped for oranges, we
learned that we had missed San Domingo, our immediate objective point,
by many miles, and so struck directly eastward for Esperanza. It was
discouraging information, for we had not eaten at all that day. We were
fighting hard and our mettle was improving. We had long since dropped the
habit of anxiety that had shadowed our efforts on the first two days.
We kept on going lower and lower into the valley. The valley became
muddier and muddier. We crossed quagmires by the score, some of them by
following a carefully planned route over solid spots. Others we crossed
by making a rough causeway of brush and any broken trees and limbs which
we could find. Still others, whose bottoms, by probing with a stick, we
found to be made of hard rock, we took by “shooting”—which means driving
full tilt straight through the mud and water. “Shooting” became a common
pastime with us and a by-word. At every mire one of us would run ahead
of the car, size it up or investigate, and yell back the directions to
“shoot her” or to get out and help build a floating bridge of brush.
[Illustration: “_The valley became muddier and muddier._”
SEE PAGE 66.]
[Illustration: “_The sun’s farewell glance spread a woven gold mantilla
on the naked shoulders of a grim, forbidding world and the motor car
sank, helpless, into the mud as if, also, its day was done._”
SEE PAGE 69.]
We had crossed several rivers that would have been ten to fifteen feet
deep with water during the rainy season. Even now some of them had
treacherous bottoms of irregularly piled stone. Before fording, it was
necessary for one of us to wade through to map out a route over the high
places along which the car might be safely driven through the water. We
did not stop for a meal at Esperanza, because the daylight was going away
from Santa Clara faster than we were going towards it and we wished to
spend the night there. We had not yet driven after dark, but to-night
it seemed that either we would have to do so or camp in a seemingly
uninhabited tract of marshy land.
The low clouds in the west, reflecting the crimson glory of the sun’s
farewell glance, spread a woven gold mantilla on the naked shoulders of
a grim, forbidding world, and the motor car sank, helpless, into the
deep mud as if, also, its day was done. We hesitated before we went to
work. We knew that, somewhere, away off behind the big, dark hills, was
Santa Clara, food, and shelter. We knew that, somehow, we would raise
the car from the enveloping mire. We had accomplished more difficult
tasks, yet we hesitated. The flaming clouds darkened into livid fires
which flickered and went out. There was no twilight. In the gloom of
ominous night, broken only by the slender rays from an oil lamp, we
took a new reef in our nerve and began another round of the desperate,
elemental fight against the mud. One of us searched for long poles to use
as pries. Another vainly sought to make a solid foundation for the jack
underneath the car. The others collected rocks. We had previously cursed
these ever-present boulders, which we now welcomed. All worn by the day’s
hard work and with a big job before us, we stopped, enchanted, as from
the far-away hills came the clear, melodious “ah, ohs!” of the voceo de
ganado—the silver tones of the native Cuban, calling home his cattle.
“Oiga, chico!” yelled the sanguine Rogelio.
“Que hay!” came the answering call.
Soon white-trousered, bare-footed, dark, wiry fellows surrounded the
strange vehicle of los Americanos. All the wealth of words in the Spanish
tongue seemed insufficient to express their wonderment. Like a small
army, guided and bullied by their natural leader, they carried stones,
swung on the long poles, yelled and fussed until, one after another, the
wheels were raised and set on an uncertain floor of rough rocks. Waldon
jumped to his seat behind the wheel. The motor spit and steadied to the
old familiar purr. The native audience stood tense and spellbound. The
clutch engaged. With a mighty wrench, the big car tore itself free,
scattering behind a wild volley of stones and mud, and jumped to the
solid ground ahead.
“El Toro!” cried a Cuban.
“El Toro!” echoed the chorus. And thus was christened the car.
It was nine o’clock, with headlights going for the first time on the
precious store of gas, when we again set out to find Santa Clara. The
hills were flat-crowned and in quick succession. We could see nothing
but a narrow streak of yellow rock ahead. We seemed always to be rising,
rising, rising, to the top of everything. Palestine must have looked like
this on a still, dark night. We could almost imagine some Old Testament
friend would steal out of the dark and bid us halt.
Our entrance to Santa Clara was in sharp contrast to the last few hours
of wandering in the solitude of the black night. We rambled noisily over
its cobbled streets. We had knocked the muffler away from the exhaust
pipe on some grass-hidden rock, and El Toro roared. The whole population
ran to the iron-barred windows or into the streets to follow us in a
curious, turbulent stream.
The hotel landlord welcomed us at the door and, as it was now raining
hard, hurried to help us find shelter for the car. Then we ate a cold
and disappointing meal in a night owl street café. An excited little man
with a big pad of paper, who said he was the reporter of the Santa Clara
newspaper, persisted in getting an extensive interview through the now
collapsed interpreter. None of us ever read that story, but, judging
from the manner of the fervid scribe, it must have drained empty the
possibilities of Cuban journalism.
We retired in a hopeful mood. This had been our record day—sixty-three
miles. We had gone to Matanzas, and they said we could not. We had
crossed rivers and swamps, and they had said we could not. In five days
we had gone 231 miles over country that was said to be impossible for any
four-wheeled vehicle. We had yet to cross the mountains. They said we
could not, but we thought we could.
Macagua to Santa Clara—sixty-three miles.
[Illustration: “_A river would be reached by following down a tortuous
pass._”
SEE PAGE 77.]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER VI
_Does the road wind up-hill all the way?_
_Yes, to the very end._
_Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?_
_From morn to night, my friend._
—Christina Rossetti.
[Illustration]
Camajuani is not well known. We never had heard of it until Tuesday,
January 7, 1908. By noon of the same day we found that there was no place
which we wished to reach quite so badly as Camajuani. We wanted to go
to a lot of other places, but, to reach any of them, we had to go via
Camajuani. We had driven ourselves into a predicament just because we had
followed the advice of one Fernandez, urbane landlord of the Santa Clara
Hotel.
We were bound southeastward from Santa Clara, through Placetas. Camajuani
is northeast of Santa Clara. Señor Fernandez said that it was necessary
to go through Camajuani to reach Placetas. We believed him. He also told
us that the heavy rain, which almost obscured the rugged mountain range
ahead of us, would not continue. Again we believed him, although, as we
eyed the morning prospect, it did not look promising to us.
At noon it continued to rain. Northern rains of our previous experience
had been mere sprinkles in comparison with this tropical downpour. We had
come six or seven miles. There was no use in going back, because that was
just as hard as going ahead. Without sun, compass, highway, or guide of
any kind, we were not much surer of the location of Santa Clara than we
were of the whereabouts of the much-sought Camajuani. It was a rough, wet
country, looking as though nature had dumped here everything left over
when she tired of molding the rest of Cuba into shape.
Rivers and creeks were at the bottom of each red dirt hill, now soaked
into muggy slime in which the protruding rocks made every inch of the
way a precarious, uncertain struggle. As the hills became higher and the
gorges became deeper, we came closer to the great ravines of the Santa Fe
mountain passes. The country was rougher than any we had yet tackled. The
only road we had to follow was the rough irregular trillo, or pony trail,
across the hills, by way of the innumerable ravines, washouts, and river
beds.
The first few miles out of Santa Clara were over a fairly good macadam
road, which gradually dissolved into a soggy trail of wet clay. The
first tire to go that day exploded while we were wallowing through the
deep mud in the lee of a ruined Spanish fort. Rogelio, being energetic
and just as keen for accomplishment as the rest of us, volunteered to
replace this tire. On several occasions he had wished to help us in
changing the inner tubes or casings. Not wishing to shirk our own work,
however, we spared Rogelio and saved him for the pump. Also, on many
occasions we carefully conserved his energy for frequent little skits
with the machete, which he handled nicely.
We knocked off work to prowl around the ruined fort, which, evidently,
had set in the center of a much-battled battle-field. When a running
schedule approximates a mile and a half an hour, a few extra minutes
spent in sight-seeing do not seriously affect it. In the meantime, the
rain continued and increased. Washouts and deep ravines, that we might
have crossed the day before without serious difficulty, were now becoming
almost impassable on account of the swashy mud. Where this mud was only
a thin layer of slime over the native rock, the hillsides, which we had
to climb in a zigzag fashion, were so slippery that even the sure-footed
Cuban ponies we occasionally met on the trail would slide and sprawl.
Between each line of hills ran a river. This would be reached by
following down a tortuous pass or a winding, rough shelf on the side
of a cliff. Three large rivers were forded. If ever there had been
bridges, they had been burnt. Each ford meant a slow, difficult drive
through water nearly two feet deep and over a treacherous bottom, partly
of stone, partly of loose rock, and partly of clay or sand. Sometimes,
in order to cross a river a hundred yards wide, it would be necessary to
drive an irregular, oblique course an eighth of a mile long.
When we could not follow the regular path up the hillside on the other
side of a river, we would be compelled to take to the bare side of the
hill, and go up in any possible direction to the top of the bluff, there
to find a roundabout way back to the trail. Many of the mountain passes
were so narrow and so furrowed with yawning gullies that we were forced
to run with one wheel on a slightly sloping side wall and the other on
the narrow crest of the deepest rut. This frequently compelled us to
cut narrow shelves in the rock to form a solid footing for the wheels.
Both going down the ravines and up the opposite ones, driving was a case
of slipping around on the rut brows. Had a wheel dropped into one of
these ruts, it would have meant a long, tedious job of jacking-up on a
foundation of loose rocks.
We must have been about a third of the way up the highest crest of the
Santa Fe mountains at noon. The car had tipped sidewise to a rakish
angle, with the left wheels deep in the mud, the middle of the car
resting on ruts, and the right wheels in space, while the whole car was
pointed upward on a stiff grade. Everything was soaked, including our
box of groceries. We opened a can of sausages with a machete, they being
the only food which the rain had not spoiled.
The worst insult is that which comes from one’s own brother. As we sat
munching our mock luncheon, while the rain beat against our faces, ran
down our backs, flooded our tonneau, and washed the bottom out of the
ravine we were trying to climb, we were greeted by a young American
surveyor on horse-back and almost hidden within the ample folds of a
rubber poncho. We explained ourselves and he explained himself, and then
started to explain the Santa Fe mountains. He was quite certain that
we could never reach the top of the ridge; in fact, he suggested that
we would be several kinds of profane fools to try. His conversational
tone implied that he thought we were, anyway. His sneering demeanor
rankled. We were glad when he and his prophecy were gone, and glad to
meet a couple of black laborers without opinions but with good muscles.
We impressed them into service. They helped us dig, scrape, and carry
stones. We were all fighting mad, and we all worked.
Foot by foot, we made a path for the car up the mountain and the car
climbed the mountain. Gradually, we won the summit of the Santa Fe ridge.
There was just one house in sight, a shack whose rough, slabbed walls
were not tight enough to keep out the deluge. It was a haven of refuge to
us, and the poor supper we ate that night on the damp, storm-darkened
mountain peak was to us a delectable banquet. The night was cold. We were
roughly bedded on benches and in hammocks.
The farmer, like many others who have homes along isolated trails, kept
a small supply of goods that might be purchased by wayfarers. We bought
four cotton blankets. All through the long, restless hours, a thin-clad
little black baby wailed most dismally with the cold. That was a dreary
night for all of us. We knew that we had done a lot, but, measured on the
map, that lot meant exactly fourteen miles. We wondered what we would do
the next day. We wondered where we would have been, had we not followed
the advice given us at Santa Clara, but had gone around the foot of the
Santa Fes instead of over their worst passes. This, our host of the night
said, we should have done, as the correct route from Santa Clara to
Placetas lay in almost the opposite direction to the way we had taken.
Santa Clara to Camp Santa Fe—fourteen miles.
[Illustration: “_We had to ford ... a fast flowing torrent set down in a
gorge ... which had no path leading to a crossing of any kind._”
SEE PAGE 84.]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER VII
_One who journeying_
_Along a way he knows not, having crossed_
_A place of drear extent, before him sees_
_A river rushing swiftly toward the deep,_
_And all its tossing current white with foam._
—Iliad.
[Illustration]
Natives of sunburnt islands often are surprising. There is a type of
Cuban negro, or creole, who is modeled after Adonis, muscled like Atlas,
and with the disposition of whatever dead and done God it was who had the
attributes of a faithful Newfoundland dog. The two men whom we had hired
the previous evening came back to help us in the morning. They were on
hand ere we awakened in the dark, wet dawn to put on our mud-plastered
shoes and be dressed.
Before we ever started the car, we went out into the big swamps that
lay between the two next hills and built a corduroy road of brush and
palm trunks. The rain had stopped for the moment, but the whole land
was water-logged. While the two Cubans whacked and slashed at brush and
palms, we lugged and carried and built our road. It takes skill as well
as muscle to chop wood with a machete. The Cubans had both. We marveled
that they could be negroes and that the strange mixture of Spanish and
African blood could produce, in a southern country, such superb giants.
To get out of the mountains we had to ford two more rivers. One was
a typical stream. The other was a fast-flowing torrent set down in a
gorge that had once been bridged, but which now had no path leading to
a crossing of any kind. Ox carts had not yet made a trail through it.
Only horses had forded. It was a disappointing sight, after a week of
endeavor such as ours had been. Casually, it looked like our finish. We
hunted up and down its banks for a defile or a shelf that we could follow
to the bottom. Two of us stripped and swam into the river, looking for a
path where the uneven bed formed ledges high enough and wide enough to
make a feasible route for the car to be driven across. In some places
immense boulders absolutely blocked our way. From the top of the gorge a
quartette of rural señoritas, apparently shocked, and yet as obviously
pleased, by this unusual exhibition, peeped slyly at us through the grass.
Finally, with one of us guiding each front wheel, the car was driven
slowly through the river on one of the twisted lines of rock. It was
nearly noon when we reached Camajuani. No king ever rode into his
capital with finer airs. Our Cuban helpers were perched on the running
boards, their russet hides gleaming in the sun and their faces beaming
with pride at being a part of such an unwonted expedition. We stopped for
breakfast, having had nothing except a hurried cup of very black and very
dirty coffee that morning. We had come three miles. Our chests expanded.
Imagine our glee when, in the café where we awaited our chicken and rice
we espied our friend, the surveyor. I have this good to report of him.
He swallowed his previous misjudgment of our capabilities with generous
congratulations and offered to buy us a bottle of Rioja blanco.
By comparison with the sloppy, muddy ravines, the long, wiggling trail of
angular rocks between Camajuani and Salamanca were, to us, a boulevard.
We struck south for Placetas, being just as far away from it as when we
had left Santa Clara. The stony trail gradually led to lower land, where
there was nothing underneath except sloughs, gullies and rivers and
nothing above except rain and a black, angry sky.
We had obtained great skill on mud holes. We could now tell the hard
bottom ones from the mires without sounding. Driving to the edge of a
sort of plateau, there spread before us a plashy lowland, which seemed
to be nothing but a succession of marshes. On the other side rose the
hazy outlines of a mountain range, but we knew what work it would take
to reach those hills. We knew that the tall grass hid mud holes and ruts
where ox carts had been laboriously dragged across.
As the gloom of the rainy afternoon deepened, telling that the meager
sunlight was about to disappear, we worried along past a picturesque
old Spanish village, set all alone in the desolation, with its ruined
cathedral another milestone in the path of the recent war. We sought a
sugar mill, tucked in a corner of the distant hills. The history of two
days before repeated itself. Again we sank into the mud as darkness hid
our plight.
These typical pantanos, or mud holes, are simply enlargements of long,
narrow rivers of mud. You may walk up and down and find no place where it
is easier to pass than at any other place. Where we failed in crossing,
either by driving carefully over the more solid lumps of earth or by
rushing the narrowest place, there remained just one thing to do: jack
up each wheel in succession and build a solid foundation of stone
underneath. With all four wheels in the mud, this is a tiresome task, at
sun down, in an unknown country, and away from even the trace of a town.
Once up out of the mud and going, we lost no time in driving across a
field to a farmhouse we had spied. It offered no accommodation, but a
short distance on the other side of a muddy river was a sugar mill. We
left the car standing in the rain by the farmhouse and pushed ahead on
foot, to the mill, for we were too tired and hungry to tackle the job of
driving the car across the river in the darkness.
At every large sugar mill there is a laborers’ eating house, in
combination with the store. Both first and second-class meals are served.
We ate first class and enjoyed it. We could have eaten second class
and, at least, swallowed it, for our appetites had lost all trace of
daintiness.
That night we found out the true meaning of hacienda. It is a beautiful
Spanish house, set in the middle of thousands of acres of sugar cane
and surrounded by people who live, but appear to have no homes. As a
wayfarer, you knock timidly at the door above the grand staircase which
is on the outside of the house, because there is only one floor to the
inside. Through the latticed window a female voice shrieks:
“Que hay!” and your interpreter reels off a thousand words of address,
introduction, request, and petition.
Then a man’s voice breaks out of the window, but the most beautiful
Castillian rhetoric, sung by the most intelligent interpreter, cannot get
him to open the door. That is an hacienda. We put up at the eating house.
Over the table on which we had eaten, we spread many layers of empty
sugar bags, borrowed from the store, whereat, also, we bought some
Cuban-made shoes and cigarros arroz. In the upper right-hand corner of
the room there was an acetylene generator. In the lower left-hand corner
was a baker’s oven. Both were busy on the night shift. Between these two
evils we stretched flat on our backs on the table, smoked and dropped the
burnt cigarettes, one after another, on the floor of sun-dried tile. We
made jokes at our own expense and drew our cotton blankets closer about
our necks as the chill of the night increased.
Toward morning we gave up the endeavor to sleep and retired to the
kitchen. The charcoal fire was almost out and we piled on more fuel. We
took off our shoes and some of our clothes and laid them around the edge
of the fire to dry. The baker gave us fresh bread and we had the first
helping of coffee, and eggs fried by dropping them into an immense pan
of deep grease, which appeared to have been used on the same stove, in
the same pan, for the same purpose, day in and day out for several years.
Then we sat down to await daylight.
Camp Santa Fe to Camp Convenio—thirteen miles.
[Illustration: “_Digging to obtain a footing for the wheels in the
roughest ravines._”
SEE PAGE 93.]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER VIII
_When I was at home, I was in a better place; but travellers must
be content._
—As You Like It.
[Illustration]
People learn rapidly under the pressure of necessity. When we had begun
driving over the roadless interior of Cuba we had favored the car. In
crossing extremely bad places we invariably chose the route which made
the car’s task the lightest. Later we learned that all the car needed was
traction and we began to favor ourselves.
Going back from the sugar mill, in the early morning, to the farmhouse
where we had left El Toro, we noticed two chances of crossing the muggy
river where automobiling in Cuba had ceased the night before. One place
was wide, low, and flat. It meant long hours of tedious filling in with
brush. The other was a narrow cut between two precipitous walls. We chose
the cut, for it required only a few minutes to fill the narrow bottom
with enough brush to allow the car to be driven down one hillside and up
the other as fast as all its power could take it.
Our underbrush pontoons were engineering triumphs. We knew exactly how
much brush it required to support the car when driven rapidly over one
of them. It would have been a mere waste of labor to have piled on
enough brush to allow slow driving, stopping, or recrossing. The whole
country was a wide morass. We were in the lowland, between two ranges of
mountains. The only difference between what we called mud holes and the
rest of the country, was that the mud holes had no bottom, whereas the
hard ground or stone underneath the remaining miles of our travel allowed
us to plow slowly through the surface mire.
Near the mill we halted before a strange and fascinating scene. A dozen
heavy carts, loaded with sugar cane, that had been left outside the mill
yard the night before, clogged the only available passageway to the
country beyond. We sat in the car and watched a hundred men and fifty
straining, tugging bulls try to get the heavy carts through the mud, in
which they settled to their axles. Musical, yet vicious, pleading, yet
commanding, using goad as well as voice, the violent drivers yelled at
each struggling bull by name:
“Tamarindo! Canario!”
Often a dozen yelled in chorus. Failing to budge the foremost cart, all
ceased their efforts and, wildly gesticulating, argued and wrangled
while more bulls were brought from a rear cart and hitched to the one
stuck in the mud ahead. It took a dozen of the wide-shouldered, powerful
bulls, pulling all together, with all their might, to drag each cart to
the hard ground in the mill yard. In the meantime, scores of idle mill
laborers, representing every type which the island affords, lounged
around, dividing their attention between the curious struggle and the
strange sight which we made in our motor car. While they watched with
curious eyes, they pared long sugar canes with skillful flips of their
machetes and sucked the thin sweetness.
At last an opening was effected. Straddling the gaping ruts, with wheels
twisted to the full limit of the springs, Waldon drove the car out of the
mess. Leaving behind a great babel of unintelligible tongues, we went
on our way toward Placetas. Sliding down embankments, crossing pools,
digging trenches to obtain a footing for the wheels in the roughest
ravines, we reached the bed of a dried river, whose hard bottom held only
occasional pools of water made by the recent rains. We followed this to a
hill, from whose brow a level path led to Placetas.
Here was a post of the United States Army and the entire force,
commissioned and enlisted, turned out to welcome us and get what home
news we had to offer. For seventeen months these regulars had been in the
little interior town and were glad to talk with Americans. They told us
about themselves and about their duties. They told us how they had put
down insurrections without ever firing a cartridge. The Cuban is not a
coward. Naturally he is a fighter, but he knows there is an awful wallop
in the sinewy fist of Uncle Sam.
The soldier boys directed us to a trail, among four, at the other edge of
town. We took the wrong one. After many miles of driving over the damp
lowlands, with all sense of direction lost in the dark, sunless day, we
learned from a passing farmer that we were going straight backward toward
Santa Clara. Also, we found that we were on the trail which we should
have taken before we had been sent up among the hills around Camajuani.
Retracing six or seven miles, we found an old, unused trail through the
grass and mud, which looked like a short cut in the right direction.
There was no variety and no town. We just plugged along in the mud,
sweated under the hard work of crossing washouts, or worried through
the tall, damp grass. We knew by our watches that the little daylight
was about to depart, and, so, when we found a used trail, we took to
it, although we had no idea where it went. At least, the trail meant a
country store or a farmhouse.
Now it was raining again and we did our best to hurry toward a hut,
just visible in the waning light. Almost in front of it, the front tire
exploded, while warping the car over the jagged rocks of a washout.
As we replaced it the interpreter negotiated with the storekeeper for
shelter and food. It proved that the whole family was sick, and that
we could not come in. However, we were informed that a tobacco grower
lived a mile farther on. We took the tobacco grower for granted, drove
through his fences and across his fields, and lost not one minute of time
making the last of our twenty-seven miles for the day. When we got to his
rather pretentious hut, which had two rooms and several lesser buildings
surrounding it, we told Rogelio to inform him that he was our host, was
very glad to see us, and that we could have everything there was in the
place to eat. We got it.
They made the meal from the ground up; killing and cleaning guinea hens,
roasting and grinding coffee—for, like many other farmers, this one grew
his own coffee—cooking rice, and boiling pottage.
There is every opportunity to eat well in Cuba. Where they do not eat
well, it is because they do not care or know how. Chickens and guinea
hens are raised without care. There is generally a guinea hen or a quail
or some other fat bird wandering around the house, anxious to be shot
for breakfast, dinner, or supper. Anything that you can stick into the
ground will grow. It is possible to raise coffee on one side of the house
and sweet potatoes on the other, bananas just outside the lean-to and
potatoes in the front yard.
There is a funny touch of Cuban innocence in their potatoes. They care
little for the small ones which grow down there, and so they ship
them to the United States, where the Broadway hostelries serve them as
Bermudas and other varieties costing four times the usual price. In
exchange, Cuba imports the vulgar Irish variety at extravagant prices and
cares not that half of them have rotted away in transit. Bananas are the
staple vegetable. They are rarely ripened and eaten as fruit. Generally,
they are picked and cooked green, by frying, like potatoes.
The lack of household economy in eating also applies to meats. Although
there is plenty of fowl and a bountiful supply of vegetables, the
stock-yards of Chicago have an extensive Cuban trade in canned meats,
of the doubtful, aged varieties. Domestic beef is muscular and better
adapted to the pulling of ox carts than to the delectation of satiated
appetites.
As we sat on the hard benches, in the dirt-floored living room, waiting
for our supper, Rogelio slumbered. The three men of the establishment
tried to talk with us, but we could only point to the peacefully sleeping
interpreter. Although we protested, the family served our meal before
it sat down to its own. They watched us eat, and then we were almost as
curious and possibly as unreserved in our candid staring while we watched
them eat.
The gathering was an unusual and picturesque one—planter in white
starched suit, laborers in rough, nondescript garb, women in loose calico
dresses, children in dirty cotton slips, a naked baby on the floor,
oblivious to surroundings while it played with a coquettish kitten, and
the eldest daughter of the house eating thick pottage from a large spoon
with her fingers. Let it not be considered, however, because the señorita
of the far-away tobacco plantation uses her fingers to segregate the meat
from the soup, that she is a spurious señorita. She has the ordinary and
universal charm of the backwoods maiden everywhere. You will notice that
literature always is prone to get human interest by ringing in a peasant
lass, a milkmaid, or some other daughter of the untonsured meadows. I
simply imitate literature by offering an olive-tinted señorita who shyly
glances over a huge spoon, from which she picks out choice chunks of
chicken with her more or less dainty fingers.
It was a big family for such a small house, and they told us we might
sleep in the tobacco store house. Señorita and señora departed to prepare
our beds. Returning, they beamed hospitably, and said that they had made
better provision for us, in another building close to hand. Waldon, with
the lighted side lamp in one hand, gallantly accompanied the ladies as
they escorted us to our bedchamber. He lost his gallantry and nearly
dropped the lamp when his glance followed its feeble rays into the shed.
“Carajo!—and then some in English! Fellows, it’s a pig pen!”
He was right. One half the interior was fenced off by a few slabs. Back
of the fence were a dozen grunting pigs. In front of the fence were piles
of corn. Above the pigs was a platform on which was piled more corn.
Two hammocks were swung on what Crebbin, who still had a laugh in him,
naively called the mezzanine floor. On the ground floor were two more
hammocks.
We matched for the mezzanine beds and retired. Outside, it rained.
Inside, the pigs grunted. We made merry. Sleeping with pigs was more
nearly a joke than a hardship. We repeated the name of the locality to
ourselves, “Casa Cinco.” Never will we forget Casa Cinco. Bent like
half-opened jack knives, in canvas hammocks, we talked and laughed, and
laughed and talked, and fell asleep to the lullaby of grunting swine.
Camp Convenio to Casa Cinco—twenty-seven miles.
[Illustration: “_At last we found the promised highway._”
SEE PAGE 103.]
[Illustration: “_The oldest cathedral in Cuba, weatherbeaten, but proudly
rising over the low tiled houses of the town._”
SEE PAGE 104.]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER IX
_Deficit omne quod nascitur._
—Quintilian.
[Illustration]
Eastward lay La Gloria, Del Tuerto, De Caballete. Three mountains, like
any other mountains, sticking into the clouds. Three mountains, below
which lay Sancti Spiritus. Like Mohammed, the mountains had it on us.
They would not come to us; we would have to go to them. The mountains
were not visible in the morning, but the planter said they were there. We
asked him where was Sancti Spiritus, and he said to go to the mountains.
We asked him how far was Sancti Spiritus, and he shook his head. We
started for the mountains, determined to reach Sancti Spiritus that day
regardless of conditions, distance, or direction.
The same old acts were rehearsed with new scenery. Down gullies we
twisted to wide rivers, forded them and scrambled up the banks, only to
drop again into marsh or perform on the high spots over ruts that the
rain could not wash out, but which it made slippery beyond description.
We did a lot of driving through fields. Where there were fences, they
were either of stone or barbed wire. The latter consisted of two or three
loosely drawn strands of wire, held by an occasional permanent post, but,
principally, by loose sticks. We cut the wires with pliers, dropped the
fence, drove into the field, picked up the fence, joined its loose ends
as best we could and drove on. In order to go a mile or two we sometimes
had to pass through a dozen fields and cut a dozen fences. The fields
which we preferred to the trail were either plowed ground or simply rough
land which never had been tilled. Always, it was covered with stones and
it was never level.
Through the beating rain we rose to the top of the ridge which had framed
our view, and saw, behind us, laid out as on a map, the last river we
had forded and, in front of us, the next one we would have to ford. Away
over at the right, sharp-nosed Pico Tuerto jutted skyward from between
its squatter brothers, Caballete and Gloria. Each successive hill became
higher. Each was flat topped like a small plateau. Between them were
swamps.
A loquacious dissembler at a small town said that a macadam road, a
relic of early Spanish days, started at the next hill and ran straight
to Sancti Spiritus. With tire chains broken and breaking, as they were
dragged over the scraggy roads, climb after climb, descent after descent,
we kept at it, in the pouring rain, looking for that road just at the
top of the next hill. It was like trying to catch up with to-morrow.
Sancti Spiritus was near. We knew that, but night was getting nearer. We
fretted at delay and took unusual chances on the hills. Sancti Spiritus
assumed the aspect of a myth.
About the time we had given up hope for the day, we found a bridge and
then another, and, at last, we found the promised highway. It was worn
and full of holes, but it was high, hard, and almost level. The clouds
parted and the sun beamed a bright farewell, just before it dropped from
sight behind the mountains. High on a neighboring crest was silhouetted
against the glowing, copper-colored sky a lone block house. Below it,
between a pair of spreading laurels, stood the ruins of a great mansion
which had been the quarters of some luckless Spanish general who allowed
the Cubans to shoot him out of house and home. A massive stone bridge,
weathered by the many years throughout which it had served generation
after generation, led us over the last river. We climbed the last hill.
Below us spread the red roofs of Sancti Spiritus.
The town received us boisterously. Each crooked street filled with noisy
crowds of men, women, and children, who darted from their homes to chase
after us to the hotel, even as though there was nothing else in Sancti
Spiritus to think of that evening. Sancti Spiritus was innocent in
automobiles, but it had heard of us. By mail had come the Santa Clara
paper, telling about the Americans in the automobile which was named El
Toro.
In the immense bedroom of the ancient hotel, while we waited for water to
be brought that we might wash, we sat on the edges of the canopied beds,
looked at each other, and merely laughed. There was something ridiculous
in being there. The adventure was over. We had come to the mountains.
Why? Because.
The story of Saturday, loitered away in this peculiar and venerable
town, is another story. Dressed in odds and ends of garments picked up
at the local stores, to replace the mud-covered, tattered clothes we had
worn continuously for a week and a half, we strayed around its crooked
streets, posed in the plaza that the wondering children might gaze upon
us, and lounged in the hotel courtyard among the flowers. Across the
corner from the plaza stands the oldest cathedral in Cuba, weatherbeaten,
but proudly rising over the low tiled houses of the town. It represents a
civilization and an art which is wasted on the reconstructed Cuban. The
latter has no apparent reverence for the picturesque architecture and the
quaint religious figures housed within its crumbling walls.
The Supreme Being of that vicinity was Captain Wise. His headquarters
were on a hill overlooking the town, and he commanded a company of United
States marines, who had built comfortable quarters and spent their
time going through the motions of military life, playing baseball and
performing the duties of an army of pacification in charge of a lot of
scrappy islanders, who, from el Señor Alcalde to el peon, were, after
all, nothing but spiggoties in the eyes of an American private soldier.
It was good to be among these child-like American boys. We had done a
little fighting ourselves, of a different kind. We had gone through
districts where all Cuba said we could not go. We had accomplished the
impossible and were satisfied. Mingled with our pride, however, was a new
respect for these greatest of soldiers, and, like them, having done what
we had come to do, we wanted to go home. There was a little bit of extra
sentiment that night, with all of the Americans in the place gathered
at headquarters, waiting for retreat to sound, when, under La Gloria’s
shadow, at the sinking of the sun, the stars-and-stripes dropped upon the
blood-red soil of new-old Cuba.
Now for the anti-climax, for it is an anti-climax to load an automobile
onto a flat car, in the darkness which shrouds such a town as Sancti
Spiritus. It is an anti-climax to be dragged away at dawn by a wheezy
engine over the wabbly, rusted tracks of a stray branch railway. It is
an anti-climax to sit at a wayside station like Zaza del Medio, waiting
for the daily train to Havana, that gay decoy which draws tourists to
Cuba. It is an anti-climax, after one has come hundreds of miles in an
automobile over land which no vehicle was ever meant to traverse, and,
then, at the sight of a fussing, careening sample of a railway train,
to dig deep into your pockets for the wherewithal to purchase a mere
ticket. We had left on hand little of the coin of the realm—any old
realm, Spanish or American. So, trying to forget who and when and where
we came from, we gave up our little mite for seats in the second-class
carriage.
All night we sat in frozen silence by the open windows, eying in tired
disgust the dirty black Cubans who shared our torture. We had not come
for this, but now we realized what we had come for. We had come to make
good on the roadless wastes. This railway coach was not Cuba; the Cuba
we knew was over at Casa Cinco, where the pig pens have mezzanine floors
and serve as hotels. We were going back to Havana. Havana was not Cuba;
Cuba was at the top of the Santa Fe mountains, where the rain washes the
traveler’s hopes down the hillside and leaves him staring into the dark,
cold night, speculating on the whereabouts of Camajuani.
Trundling along behind, on a flat car, was an automobile. It was more
than an automobile, as it had an identity of its own. It was El Toro.
There were no other Packards like it. It had done more than we had
done, for we simply had given it a chance. We simply were engineers in
traction. We had found a path. Surely the Cubans had named it right, when
they called it The Bull.
In the morning we would find Havana, money, new clothes, passage to the
United States and the frozen north from whence we had come.
What of it?
You can’t railroad memory. Technically, we were leaving Cuba. In reality,
we stayed; stayed there where our recollections were and where we had
learned the greatness of a philosophy which makes a man do things—just
because. Some day we are going back, we hope. Some day, when the new
government has spent its thirty millions of dollars and built its many
highways. We are going back to rush over the country in El Toro; to dash,
in reckless flight, by the same places where we struggled up the hills
inch by inch.
Why? Just because.
Casa Cinco to Sancti Spiritus—twenty-eight miles.
Havana to Sancti Spiritus—313 miles.
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