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.
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