I went thither by railway,
in a car built at Newark, drawn by an engine made in New York, and worked
by an American engineer.
For some distance we passed through fields of the
sweet-potato, which here never requires a second planting, and propagates
itself perpetually in the soil, patches of maize, low groves of bananas
with their dark stems, and of plantains with their green ones, and large
tracts producing the pineapple growing in rows like carrots. Then came
plantations of the sugar-cane, with its sedge-like blades of pale-green,
then extensive tracts of pasturage with scattered shrubs and tall dead
weeds, the growth of the last summer, and a thin herbage bitten close to
the soil. Here and there was an abandoned coffee-plantation, where cattle
were browzing among the half-perished shrubs and broken rows of trees; and
the neglected hedges of the wild pine, _pina raton_, as the Cubans call
it, were interrupted with broad gaps.
Sometimes we passed the cottages of the _monteros_, or peasants, built
often of palm-leaves, the walls formed of the broad sheath of the leaf,
fastened to posts of bamboo, and the roof thatched with the long
plume-like leaf itself. The door was sometimes hung with a kind of curtain
to exclude the sun, which the dusky complexioned women and children put
aside to gaze at us as we passed. These dwellings were often picturesque
in their appearance, with a grove of plantains behind, a thicket of bamboo
by its side, waving its willow-like sprays in the wind; a pair of
mango-trees near, hung with fruit just ripening and reddish blossoms just
opening, and a cocoa-tree or two lifting high above the rest its immense
feathery leaves and its clusters of green nuts.
We now and then met the _monteros_ themselves scudding along on their
little horses, in that pace which we call a rack. Their dress was a Panama
hat, a shirt worn over a pair of pantaloons, a pair of rough cowskin
shoes, one of which was armed with a spur, and a sword lashed to the left
side by a belt of cotton cloth. They are men of manly bearing, of thin
make, but often of a good figure, with well-spread shoulders, which,
however, have a stoop in them, contracted, I suppose, by riding always
with a short stirrup.
Forests, too, we passed. You, doubtless, suppose that a forest in a soil
and climate like this, must be a dense growth of trees with colossal stems
and leafy summits. A forest in Cuba - all that I have seen are such - is a
thicket of shrubs and creeping plants, through which, one would suppose
that even the wild cats of the country would find it impossible to make
their way. Above this impassable jungle rises here and there the palm, or
the gigantic ceyba or cotton-tree, but more often trees of far less
beauty, thinly scattered and with few branches, disposed without symmetry,
and at this season often leafless.
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