The Santiago road, after leaving the village of Siboney, runs up a wide marshy valley, full of stagnant ponds and lagoons, and sparsely set with clumps of cocoanut and royal palm. Although this valley heads in the mountains of the Cobre range, and opens on the sea through the Siboney notch, its atmosphere seems hot and close, and is pervaded by a foul, rank odor of decaying vegetation, which is unpleasantly suggestive of malaria and Cuban fever, and makes one wish that one could carry air as one carries water, and breathe, as well as drink, out of a canteen. But one soon escapes from it. A mile or two from the village the road leaves the valley, turns to the left, and begins to ascend a series of densely wooded ridges, or foot-hills, which rise, one above another, to the crest of the watershed just beyond Sevilla. From the point where we left the valley to the summit of the divide, we never had an unobstructed outlook in any direction. Dense tropical forests, almost impenetrable to the eye, closed in upon the road, and when the sea-breeze was cut off and the sun stood vertically overhead, we lost all means of orientation and could hardly guess in what direction we were going. Now and then, at the bottom of a valley or on a sloping hillside, we passed a small, grassy opening, which would be called, in West Virginia, a glade or an interval; but during most of the time we plodded along in the fierce heat, between walls of dark-green foliage which rose out of an impenetrable jungle of vines, pinon-bushes, and Spanish bayonet. I saw no flowers except the clustered heads of a scarlet-and-orange blossom which I heard some one call the "Cuban rose," and I did not see a bird of any kind until we approached the battle-field of Guasimas, where scores of vultures were soaring and circling above the tree-tops, as if aware of the fact that in the leafy depths of the jungle below were still lying the unburied and undiscovered bodies of Spanish dead.