VI.
"Nice pretty House in the Country”—Wrong Side of the Horse—Discovery in Mental Photography—Visit to the Country House—Not to be obtained—Contrast of Palms and Bamboos—The Youth of Tropical Nature—A Remarkable Phenomenon—House of the Marquise of V——“Le Armistad”—Burial of an Officer’s Child—A Shock—“Cafetal”—“La Providencia”—A Sugar Plantation—The “Royal Highway”—A Grand View.
HIS evening comes Mr. S—— from Father P——, full of a nice pretty house we are to get in the country. Immediately a horse resembling an overgrown rat is procured, warranted amiable with ladies, and we prepare for investigation.
Imagine my dismay when about to mount, to find the side-saddle turned to the right of the horse instead of the left. It is indeed the ordinary style of this extraordinary country. I remember seeing ladies in long, white habits, riding in this way in the suburbs of Havana, quite at ease, and unsuspicious of the droll figure they were making. I have, however, seen or been told that ladies in the south of Europe are taught both modes of riding, still, I am not inclined to try a new horse in a new manner; so, after a change of saddles, we find ourselves sailing off in the stereotyped gait of the Cuban horse, than which nothing can be more safe, or less calculated for the display of horsewomanship. The scene is exquisite; we could ask no change in “the day, the place, the hour, the sunshine and the shade,” except that one might excuse the low, red afternoon sun from peering up so inquisitively as it does under one’s eyelids.
How dense and massive are these great cactus hedges on either side of the road! and how their fierceness is softened or masked by thick vines creeping and penetrating everywhere, with blossoms and perfumes in their hands!
My equestrian experiences continually reimpress upon me a discovery I am making in the philosophy of mental photography of scenery.
Riding towards the east is far more inspiriting than going towards the west. Travelling to the south is equally more cheering than to the north. I find that western views, however intrinsically beautiful, have in them an accent of sadness, of departure, of farewells. It is there that the sun, and moon, and stars go down to be buried, leaving behind them a consciousness that all bright and fair and tender things must also drop into a night of death.
Eastern views, on the contrary, however rude and desolate, are yet seen and beautified through an atmosphere of hope. A sweet sense of promise always comes up from under the orient; there is an inherent life and light in it that no stalking shades can terrify.
Northern views, though outwardly full of grace and beauty, have always about them a haunting desolation. You think only of those “thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice,” with no heart beating under the ribs, no blood in the veins, no kindling in the fixed eye. You fall into shivering reveries about the unbending attitude of those hyperborean scenes, wondering if it is their backbone, the north pole that keeps them there forever, so stiff and stark. You see those ice fields inhabited mostly by the longing looks, the gasping yearnings of lost souls who are condemned to burn forever in flames that do not purify or consume.