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.

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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.]

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