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.

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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.]

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