CHAPTER II

_Your isle, which stands_ _As Neptune’s, ribbed and paled in with rocks unscalable._

—Cymbeline.

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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.]

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