At Present We Keep A
Few Negroes Here, Just To Gather The Berries Which Ripen, Without Taking
Any Trouble To Preserve The Plants, Or Replace Those Which Die."
I could easily believe from what I saw on this estate, that there must be
a great deal of beauty
Of vegetation in a well-kept coffee plantation, but
the formal pattern in which it is disposed, the straight alleys and rows
of trees, the squares and parallelograms, showed me that there was no
beauty of arrangement. We fell in, before we returned to our inn, with the
proprietor, a delicate-looking person, with thin white hands, who had been
educated at Boston, and spoke English as if he had never lived anywhere
else. His manners, compared with those of his steward, were exceedingly
frosty and forbidding, and when we told him of the civility which had
been shown us, his looks seemed to say he wished it had been otherwise.
Returning to our inn, we dined, and as the sun grew low, we strolled out
to look at the town. It is situated on a clear little stream, over which
several bathing-houses are built, their posts standing in the midst of the
current. Above the town, it flows between rocky banks, bordered with
shrubs, many of them in flower. Below the town, after winding a little
way, it enters a cavern yawning in the limestone rock, immediately over
which a huge ceyba rises, and stretches its leafy arms in mid-heaven. Down
this opening the river throws itself, and is never seen again. This is not
a singular instance in Cuba. The island is full of caverns and openings in
the rocks, and I am told that many of the streams find subterranean
passages to the sea. There is a well at the inn of La Punta, in which a
roaring of water is constantly heard. It is the sound of a subterranean
stream rushing along a passage in the rocks, and the well is an opening
into its roof.
In passing through the town, I was struck with the neat attire of those
who inhabited the humblest dwellings. At the door of one of the cottages,
I saw a group of children, of different ages, all quite pretty, with oval
faces and glittering black eyes, in clean fresh dresses, which, one would
think, could scarcely have been kept a moment without being soiled, in
that dwelling, with its mud floor. The people of Cuba are sparing in their
ablutions; the men do not wash their faces and hands till nearly mid-day,
for fear of spasms; and of the women, I am told that many do not wash at
all, contenting themselves with rubbing their cheeks and necks with a
little aguardiente; but the passion for clean linen, and, among the men,
for clean white pantaloons, is universal. The _montero_ himself, on a
holiday or any public occasion, will sport a shirt of the finest linen,
smoothly ironed, and stiffly starched throughout, from the collar
downward.
The next day, at half-past eleven, we left our inn, which was also what we
call in the United States a country store, where the clerks who had just
performed their ablutions and combed their hair, were making segars behind
the counter from the tobacco of the Vuelta Abajo, and returned by the
railway to Havana. We procured travelling licenses at the cost of four
dollars and a half each, for it is the pleasure of the government to levy
this tax on strangers who travel, and early the following morning took the
train for Matanzas.
Letter XLVIII.
Matanzas. - Valley of Yumuri.
Los Guines, _April_ 18, 1849.
In the long circuit of railway which leads from Havana to Matanzas, I saw
nothing remarkably different from what I observed on my excursion to San
Antonio. There was the same smooth country, of great apparent fertility,
sometimes varied with gentle undulations, and sometimes rising, in the
distance, into hills covered with thickets. We swept by dark-green fields
planted with the yuca, an esculent root, of which the cassava bread is
made, pale-green fields of the cane, brown tracts of pasturage, partly
formed of abandoned coffee estates where the palms and scattered
fruit-trees were yet standing, and forests of shrubs and twining plants
growing for the most part among rocks. Some of these rocky tracts have a
peculiar appearance; they consist of rough projections of rock a foot or
two in height, of irregular shape and full of holes; they are called
_diente de perro_, or dog's teeth. Here the trees and creepers find
openings filled with soil, by which they are nourished. We passed two or
three country cemeteries, where that foulest of birds, the turkey-vulture,
was seen sitting on the white stuccoed walls, or hovering on his ragged
wings in circles over them.
In passing over the neighborhood of the town in which I am now writing, I
found myself on the black lands of the island. Here the rich dark earth of
the plain lies on a bed of chalk as white as snow, as was apparent where
the earth had been excavated to a little depth, on each side of the
railway, to form the causey on which it ran. Streams of clear water,
diverted from a river to the left, traversed the plain with a swift
current, almost even with the surface of the soil, which they keep in
perpetual freshness. As we approached Matanzas, we saw more extensive
tracts of cane clothing the broad slopes with their dense blades, as if
the coarse sedge of a river had been transplanted to the uplands.
At length the bay of Matanzas opened before us; a long tract of water
stretching to the northeast, into which several rivers empty themselves.
The town lay at the southwestern extremity, sheltered by hills, where the
San Juan and the Yumuri pour themselves into the brine. It is a small but
prosperous town, with a considerable trade, as was indicated by the
vessels at anchor in the harbor.
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