In Some Parts The
Cliffs Almost Seemed To Impend Over The Valley; But To The West, In A Soft
Golden Haze, Rose Summit Behind Summit, And Over Them All, Loftiest And
Most Remote, Towered The Mountain Called The _Pan De Matanzas_.
We stopped for a few moments at a country seat on the top of the Cumbre,
where this beautiful view lay ever before the eye.
Round it, in a garden,
were cultivated the most showy plants of the tropics, but my attention was
attracted to a little plantation of damask roses blooming profusely. They
were scentless; the climate which supplies the orange blossom with intense
odors exhausts the fragrance of the rose. At nightfall - the night falls
suddenly in this latitude - we were again at our hotel.
We passed our Sunday on a sugar estate at the hospitable mansion of a
planter from the United States about fifteen miles from Matanzas. The
house stands on an eminence, once embowered in trees which the hurricanes
have leveled, overlooking a broad valley, where palms were scattered in
every direction; for the estate had formerly been a coffee plantation. In
the huge buildings containing the machinery and other apparatus for making
sugar, which stood at the foot of the eminence, the power of steam, which
had been toiling all the week, was now at rest. As the hour of sunset
approached, a smoke was seen rising from its chimney, presently pufis of
vapor issued from the engine, its motion began to be heard, and the
negroes, men and women, were summoned to begin the work of the week.
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