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.

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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.]

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