Really the straight, tall lines of boles with their parachute tops, in a rapidly diminishing light, do produce a very novel impression—half rural, half architectural. One may fancy aisles and naves, transepts and choirs; the roofs, however, are real, made of leaves fourteen feet long, drooping like the mitres of a groin, and gothicizing a roof through which a few slender green rays penetrate—enough to reveal form without detail. But no marble gives sound to our footsteps; grass, poor a cow would say, but grass, for a carpet, and old cocoa-nuts to stumble over, bring us down to earth again. Here we are rewarded by some pretty flowers, which are the only beauties in this land of beauty who can wander “in maiden’s meditation, fancy free.” It is an effort to mount the Pisgah before us, but we must on to the very top, for our ankles are goaded by living spurs that lie lurking in the grass.
But we are spaciously rewarded, for there lies Havana in its whole extent before us; the level line of sea behind it; the Morro guarding it; the Principe fort threatening it; the bay reflecting it and the setting sun gilding it; palms on every hand outline their greens against the intensely azure sky behind, and white walls glance out of the luxuriant foliage, proud that humanity has a home within them. Low-like mounds fill up the background like priests with shaven crowns, but all with beauteous vestments sweeping to their feet, running over the plains between them, up the adjacent ones, round the next—an interminable reticulation of life and loveliness. The embroidery on God’s footstool is here wrought with a lavish and loving hand.
Wonderful tropics! The normal home of man; the only soil and sun in which could grow the fair and fatal tree of knowledge or of life.
No sinister cold, no smoke-tarnished atmosphere, no death-bearing fogs, no fierce animal energy, no gross crimes; all is sunny and perpetual youth. Eden unquestionably was not more than twenty-three or thirty degrees from the equator. But the intermittent flash of the light in the tower of the Morro startles every half minute the sudden nightfall, and we hasten to return, in love with nature, and reconciled to ourselves.
Monday, March 13th.—This morning came Mr. R——, bringing an unexpected armful of books, with which we are to equip ourselves for a visit to the country, where we are making arrangements to go. Commenced the morning by chess, in which I am now habitually ruined, and ended, as usual, by a long conversation, in which I am listener-in-chief, an interested if not a brilliant or eloquent one.
Mr. R—— is a Romanist, but I learn from him more of the corruption of the clergy of the island than an uninitiated Protestant or Romanist either could invent. Priests in the country are badly salaried, often unable to get enough to pay their cooking and washing. So they become entangled in a peculiar kind of reciprocity with some negress or quadroon, who in time comes to live openly with them, and is recognized, and not unfrequently respected and acknowledged socially, as the mother of their large families. I find residents here indignant at visitors who come and skip over the surface of the country, necessarily, if they write at all, as superficial as false and absurd. Madame ——’s book is said to be a tissue of falsehoods, as well as that of D——, which I had supposed photographic. Every one, in fact, but Humboldt, has assumed a knowledge to hide ignorance. Cuba seems to be the least abused because least investigated country which has got into books.
Mr. R—— accepted our invitation to dinner. Like all Frenchmen, he prefers claret to other wines, and, like all old men who wish to live long, eats nothing.
Thursday, 15th.—Who can wonder that sailors never tire of seeing the sea. With what a loyal instinct the old retired captain seeks the shelter of some wave-worn cliff where the familiar spray may kiss his weather-beaten cheek, and the cry of the deep be the lullaby of his last sleep. Primeval forests want light; prairies are “stale and flat” if not “unprofitable;” mountain ranges, those petrified waves of earth, are groups of individuals: but ocean is one, an adequate expression of extent illimitable, of bulk immeasurable, of depth unfathomable, of force irresistible, of life everlasting. It is the eternity of time. But here in Cuba, where so much is transitory and fugitive, where the accumulation of wealth to expend elsewhere is the aim of all, the æsthetic claims of the sea are unregarded. The backs of the houses are universally turned towards it. The Cubans smother palaces in narrow streets, rejecting the air which has learned purity and inspiration from the sea, for siroccos of dust and heat. Ugly wharves abound, so do batteries to make might right. It is only in refinement without degeneracy, in taste without tinsel, in wealth without avarice, that you find the loving adornment of ocean’s shores.
We rode, while thinking and saying these things, to Chomero, a little bay with little cottages on its little sandy shore; little shrubs, little shells, and little life. A square fort guards it in sinister silence; a large railway station promises to turn the little Chomero into the large suburban Carmelo, and straight streets, straight avenues, and right angles threaten to make it as ugly as the tasteless plans of architects could devise.
But deliciously sweet is the air; deliciously sweet the new old story of the sea, and deliciously sweet the mareschino with which we flavor our aqua pura. All things return to their original starting point. Existence is a rounding of circles. The sun, a tired prodigal, returns to the parent arms of the horizon; like Socrates, his last act is to bathe, which he does in the returning tide, and he returns to el Hotel de la Reina, there to chat with Father, C—— or play with Señor R——, or, better still, to lounge on the sofas and fan our tropical thoughts into tropical dreams.