In Quest of El Dorado

by Stephen Graham

I imagine that may be so, as I pay forty cents for a half bottle of very bad Hamburg beer. It could not have cost more than four cents in Hamburg. The dinner is very simple, no French flourishes of cuisine, no Spanish traditions either, but there is enough; three beef courses and then guava jelly and coffee. And for this you pay at the same rate as you would at Shepheards hotel in Cairo. Or you may pay more.

I am told by Dominicans that the republic in bondage is doing so well that the 1908 bonds due in 1958 will probably be paid off in 1925, and the 1918 bonds due in 1938 would be paid this year (1923). There is a certain new artificial prosperity. It is due to the fact that the inhabitants have been forced to think in dollars and cents, and cease thinking in pesos and gramos. But the Dominican, it seems, will not take the blessings of peace and prosperity into account when it is balanced against political liberty.

I go out to the promenade of the town. I see the lonely American soldiers sitting bored on the park seats, and not one of them with a girl or a chum.

"No one will go with them," says a Dominican. "We don't feel anything against them personally, we know they are only sent by their government and have to obey. But we are against their government and always shall be till they go."

This was spoken by one of the white Spanish aristocracy who are now endeavoring to organize a passive boycott in the island.

Santiago of the Gentlemen is Santiago of the Ladies also. Behold a remarkable festival takes place, which brings the ladies forth in all their finery. The fiesta is in honor of the new road which has joined city with city. After four hundred years Santiago has been connected with the Capital by a road. Up till May of this year there was only an adventurous horseman's trail. But due to the bustling United States of America the hundred and seventy kilometers between Santiago and the city of Santo Domingo has been bridged. Henceforth it is undignified to be seen on a horse—only the poor people, the blacks, the beggars, go on horses. All people who are people go in Ford cars. The super-hooters tear along the highway, and the sultry mango trees drooping with their fruit look as if civilization were dawning on them at last. And the snakes that would bask on the way have learned of a new fast-going enemy that roars like a lion and bumps over them like an elephant and yet flies past like an eagle.

The worthies of the city have issued the most grandiosely worded invitations to the Capitalaños to a three days' general "at home," banquet, and ball. It is a good idea. Santiago is up in the fresher air, a wind is always blowing. The mosquitoes are fewer, and the nights are cool. Indeed, the ladies of the capital carry fur wraps in the evening when the temperature drops to about 70°. Not that any one walks anywhere by day. It is much too hot for that, and if I set off for the river on foot they look at me from their cars and stare. Many people wear green or yellow sun spectacles, which look quaint against a dark complexion. The light is not, however, so glaring as in Egypt or Central Asia, and the heat seems much easier to bear.

I have come to the conclusion that life on these tropical islands can be very good all the year round. The heat does not devitalize one, though something in the air seems to whisper that nothing in the whole world is of any importance. Those who come to Santo Domingo soon feel the "lure" and are ready to stay there forever. I watched the routine of the American soldiers at the white and antique "Fortaleza de San Luis," and the sentries standing languidly but happily, with their bayonets smiling in the sun, and I saw the dreamy look in their eyes, though they were not dreaming of home. Drink, however, seems to be a strong temptation. I saw one never sober warrant officer who was drinking himself to death; an educated man, who boasted comically that he had been "exposed for two years to Cornell." America has not enforced the Dry Law in Domingo nor in Haiti. She has not suggested it in Cuba, though it holds in the zone of her territory in Panama and it has been hinted at in Northern Mexico.

The fiesta, however, means but little to the garrison. It means more to every one else than to them. Down below the earth bastion of the fortress and the deep gun emplacements foams the broad and fresh flowing Rio, and black and brown children are floating in it like luscious fruits, and there are crimson-foliaged trees beside the broad beach where scores of donkeys and ponies with panniers are waiting for water. Every pannier holds two petrol cans, and when the cans are filled the boys squat across them and beat the donkeys up the long hill to the town, and then hawk the water from street to street. Thus here, as in old Spain, water selling is a trade. And the ladies of the capital need water to wash off the dust, and the boys make double profits.