I also assure you that pen and ink have no natural, or so far as I am concerned, acquired relations with these transcendent tropical nights we are having now; nights when you can feel this wonderful moonlight, creeping in its slippers of silence, over all the longing darkness, through all the sleeping lids of this softly breathing nature, sprinkling them all the time with its white juice-of-love-in-idleness. Sometimes, you lie its willing and helpless victim, until all your unpastured emotions come to be swayed by it, as by a shepherd’s voice. Again you can think of it only as growing, growing, more and more, wider and deeper, all over the world, like a blanched and intangible parasite, which no morning will ever dare with profane fingers to pull up by the roots.
Tuesday, April 3d.—Yesterday we remembered the invitation of the major domo of the sugar plantation, where oxen instead of steam get the saccharineness out of sugar-cane, as we do out of babies—by squeezing. The consequence was that the rough Creole saw the sun and us dawning upon him at the same distinguished moment; that we dismounted to be conducted over the establishment; that the trampling feet of oxen, the monotonous and endless cries of their female drivers, rang in my ears as repulsively as they did at first, and still keep doing, in spite of all my efforts to banish them; that we stood beside the boiling cauldron, where two withered old men were stationed to skim off the scum, and remind one of the witches in Macbeth bent over their cauldron to catch the scum, the “Bubble, bubble, Toil and trouble” of human destiny. While I stood looking at this strange scene, our conductor, with great empressment, drew from his pocket two fine cigars, offering one to me, and the other to B——, and was sorely chagrined and puzzled that I declined it. I was obliged to resort to the plea of invalidism to pacify him. From this we went to the refining house, where little inverted tin pyramids, full of sugar, were setting all over the floors, with thick layers of black clay spread over their heads, and little tubs, to catch the molasses, set under the opening in their feet. This apartment opened into the one for drying in which these little vessels had been emptied; the whitened sugar lay evenly all over the floor, and a fat negress walked over it with a rake in her hand, and the shoes she was born in on her feet.
I noticed here, as often before, deep scars on the women’s necks, cheeks, and arms, frightfully disfiguring, and painfully suggestive, but I was relieved to find it is only the effects of their favorite custom of tattooing. I thought before, that nature and the most servile of drudgery had carried the ugliness of these poor wretches to the extremest verge of possibility, but I find that, in that “deep,” as well as in all others, there is still a “lower deep.”
We were also puzzled to divine the import of immense round cushions fastened securely upon nearly all the women’s heads, but soon discovered they were to make a comfortable seat for the immense burdens of sugar going from one house to another; for all the ordinary burdens we had before seen, carried on the head (negroes here have no idea that their heads were made for any other use) had been simply with the aid and comfort of the woolly padding of nature.
VIII.
Dear old Mr. R—— — Chess and Whist and Life—Good Friday—A Religious Procession—The silence of the Town—The Miserere—To Matanazas—Company in the Cave—Father M——’s approach to Matanzas—The Bay—Valley of the Yumuri—The Plaza—The Dominica—The Ensor House—Easter Sunday—The Paseo—Steamer to Havana—A Night on board—“Queen’s Hotel”—Tricks on a Travelling Author—Theft on the Almanac.