The port was somewhat larger, more sanitary and more enterprising than we had expected. Cacao, sugar, and tobacco were being run on mule-drawn hand-cars out to a waiting steamer, though, strictly speaking, the open roadstead can scarcely be called a harbor. The town was pretty, shaded in its outer portions by cocoanut and other seaside tropical trees, and with all the usual Spanish-American features. A church completely covered with sheet iron walled one side of the delightful little plaza, about which were the customary open clubs, one of them occupied by American marines, whose rag-time phonographs and similar pastimes ladened the evening breezes more than all the others. The cemetery on the edge of the sloping hills was agreeably decorated with bushes of velvety, dark red leaves, but I remember it rather because of the name of a marine sergeant on the bulkhead of one of those curious Spanish rows of bureau-drawer graves set into the massive outer wall. Strange final resting-place of an American boy! Nor was he of this new generation of “leather-necks” that has settled down to make Santo Domingo behave itself; he had been left there early in the century, probably from some passing ship. The familiar time-battered carriages with their jangling bells rumbled languidly through the streets; a match factory that lights all the cigars of the revolutionary republic jostled for space among the dwellings; swarms of mosquitoes drove us to take early refuge within our bed-shielding mosquiteros; American bugle calls broke now and then on the soft night air, and a large generous bullet-hole gave the final national touch to our weak-showered, tubless hotel bathroom.
Our longer trip eastward from Santiago happily coincided with the monthly inspection tours of their district by “Mac” and “Big George.” The run to Moca through a rich, floor-flat valley spreading far away to the southward gave new evidence of the fertility of Santo Domingo. Bananas and cacao, maize and yuca in the same fields, now and then a coffee plantation, constituted the chief cultivation. Tobacco was being transplanted here and there. Frequent villages were hidden away in the greenery; nowhere was there any evidence of such abject poverty as that of Haiti. A section of the new national highway which, under American incentive, is destined some day to connect Monte Cristi with the far-off capital, followed the railway, but its black loam surface, hardened into enormous cracks and ruts since the end of the last rainy season, made it too venturesome a risk even for the courageous Ford. A long viaduct lifted the train across what Spanish-Americans call a river, and a moment later we had come to the end of the government railroad.
Moca, famous for its coffee, which is so often taken to be of Arabic origin, is rated a “white town,” because of a slightly increased percentage of pure, or nearly pure, descendants of Castilians. Thanks to the coffee-clad foot-hills to the north and the broad, fertile plain to the south and east, it is wealthy above the average, and rumor has it that much gold might be dug up from its back gardens and patios. There is special reason for this, for like its neighbor, Salcedo, it has ever been a center of revolutionists, bandits, and political intrigues. Two presidents have been assassinated in its streets; its hatred of Americans is as deadly as it dares to be under a firm marine commander. An excellent, cement-paved, up-to-date market contrasts with the dusty open spaces, with their squatting, ragged negresses, in Haiti. What was designed to be an imposing stone church, however, has never reached anything like completion. Not long ago the resident padre had the happy thought of instituting a lottery to swell the contributions from his tardy parishioners, and two glaringly new square cement towers are the result of the inspiration. But time moves more swiftly than the best devised schemes; as the towers rise, the already aged stone walls go crumbling away, and the real place of worship consists merely of a ragged thatched roof on stilts covering only a fraction of the half-walled inclosure.
The Ferrocarril de Samaná y Santiago, neither of which towns it actually reaches, connects at Moca with the government line and runs to the port of Sanchez on the east coast, with short branches to La Vega and San Francisco de Macoris. It is popularly known as the “Scotch line,” is some thirty years old and still equipped with the original rolling stock, but has a meter gauge, more commodious and better ventilated cars, a more easily riding roadbed, a daily service in both directions except on Sunday, and makes slightly better speed than its rival. The short run to La Vega, with a change of cars at Las Cabullas, is along the same rich valley. Founded by Columbus himself in a slightly different locality, this center of a splendidly fertile cacao and agricultural district is a near replica of Moca, all but surrounded by the river Camú. Rich black mud, as is fitting in a region producing the chocolate-yielding pods, slackens the footsteps of visitor and resident alike in all but the few blocks bordering on the plaza though all its streets were once paved with stone by a Haitian governor. “Mac” found interest in its distilleries, shops, and revenue office; “Big George” made use of those seven-league legs to set the property valuation of the town in one short day, but our own curiosity centered about the “Holy Hill” and the ruins of the original settlement. To tell the truth the latter does not give the traveler’s imagination much to build upon. A few miles from the modern town, along a stone-surfaced section of that national highway-to-be, are the remnants of a few stone walls, a low ancient fortress or two, and slabs of good old Spanish mortar that has outlived the flat, pale-red bricks it once held together, all hidden away in the hot and humid wilderness of a badly tended cacao plantation.
The great place of pilgrimage of the region, indeed, the most venerated spot in all Santo Domingo, is the Santo Cerro, a plump hill surmounted by a massive stone church, a mile or so nearer the town. Now and again some faithful believer still comes from a distant corner of the republic and climbs the long stony slope on his knees, though such medieval piety has all but died out even in Santo Domingo. The church at the summit is in the special keeping of Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, whose miraculous cures are reputed to have no superior anywhere in the Catholic world. A town of superstitious invalids clusters about the entrance to the inclosure in wretched thatched huts; on certain days of the year the sacred hilltop is crowded with the more modern type of pilgrim, who not infrequently comes by carriage or motor.
The story runs—and up to a certain point at least it is historically accurate—that Columbus and his men had camped on the hill, when they beheld swarming up from the vega below a great horde of Indians, bent on their immediate destruction. The discoverer was equal to the occasion. Ordering his men to cut a branch from an immense níspero tree beneath which he had been resting, he fashioned it into a crude cross, and planted it before the advancing enemy. “Then,” as the cautious old Italian padre who to-day replaces his illustrious fellow-countryman put it, “I was not present, so I cannot vouch for it, but they say”—that the Virgin of Las Mercedes appeared in the sky above and saved the day for the conquistadores. At any rate the Indians were repulsed, and the Spaniards at once set about building La Vega, old La Vega, that is, at the foot of the hill.
The church of pilgrimage is modern, marking the site of the ancient one that was erected over the improvised cross. It, too, is liberally marked with patched bullet-holes, for Dominican revolutionists have no compunction in using even a sacro-sacred edifice as a barricade. Inside, in addition to the richly garbed doll over the altar and the usual gaudy bric-a-brac of such places, there is a square hole in the marble pavement of the principal chapel, filled with yellowish soil. This purports to be the exact spot on which Columbus erected the cross, and the healing properties of the earth within it depend only on the faith of the seeker after health—and certain other indispensable little formalities which are inseparable from all supernatural cures. Pious Dominicans step into the santo hoyo barefooted, muttering promesas, or promises of reward to the attendant Virgin if their health is restored, and even those who decline to uncover their pedal infirmities in so public a place carry off a pinch or a handful of the sacred earth. Yet the “holy hole” is not the deep well one would fancy four centuries of such excavation must have left it. If anything it is slightly above the level of the ground outside the church. For no matter how much of the yellow soil is carried off during the day, morning always finds the hole filled again by some “miracle”—which somehow brings up visions of a poor old native peon wandering about in the darkest hours of the night with a sack and a shovel.
The original níspero stood for more than four hundred years in the identical spot where Columbus found it. Not until the month of May before our visit did it at length fall down—“por descuido; for lack of care,” as the present padre put it, sadly. But the pious old Italian has planted in its place a “son” of the historical tree,—a twig that already shows a will to fill the footsteps of its “father”—and from the wood of the latter he has made a boxful of little crosses which he gives away “to true believers as sacred relics; to others as souvenirs”—though there is nothing to hinder the recipient of either class from dropping into the padre’s bloodless hand a little remembrance “for my poor.”
Even though Columbus had never climbed it nor “miracles” been performed upon it, the holy hilltop would be a place worth coming far to see, or at least to look from. The wonderful floor-flat Vega Real, the most splendid plain in Santo Domingo, if not in the West Indies, is spread out below it in all its entirety. Dense green, palm-dotted above its sea of vegetation, even its cultivated places patches of unbroken greenery, with Moca, Salcedo, far-off “Macoris,” and half a dozen other towns plainly visible, a sparkling river gleaming here and there, walled in the vast distance by ranges that rise to pine-clad heights, there are few more extensive, verdant, or entrancing sights in the world than this still more than half virgin vale. Compared with it in any respect the far-famed valley of Yumurí in Cuba is of slight importance.