Near this mound, and on the trail leading to it from Siboney, I saw, for the first time, Cuban land-crabs, and formed the opinion, which subsequent experience only confirmed, that they, with the bloody-necked Cuban vultures, are the most disgusting and repellent of all created things. Tarantulas, rattlesnakes, and some lizards are repulsive to the eye and unpleasantly suggestive to the imagination; but the ugliest of them all is not half so uncanny, hideous, and loathsome to me as the Cuban land-crab. It resembles the common marine crab in form, and varies in size from the diameter of a small saucer to that of a large dinner-plate. Instead of being gray or brown, however, like its aquatic relative, it is highly colored in diversified shades of red, scarlet, light yellow, orange, and black. Sometimes one tint prevails, sometimes another, and occasionally all of these colors are fantastically blended in a single specimen. The creature has two long fore claws, or pincers; small eyes, mounted like round berries on the ends of short stalks or pedicels; and a mouth that seems to be formed by two horny, beak-like mandibles. It walks or runs with considerable rapidity in any direction,--backward, sidewise, or straight ahead,--and is sure to go in the direction that you least expect. If you approach one, it throws itself into what seems to be a defensive attitude, raises aloft its long fore claws, looks at you intently for a moment, and then backs or sidles away on its posterior legs, gibbering noiselessly at you with the horny mandibles of its impish mouth, and waving its arms distractedly in the air like a frightened and hysterical woman trying to keep off some blood-chilling apparition. All of these crabs are scavengers by profession and night-prowlers by habit, and they do not emerge from their lurking-places in the jungle and make their appearance on the trails until the sun gets low in the west. Then they come out by the hundred, if not by the thousand; and as it begins to grow dark, the still atmosphere of the deep, lonely forest is filled with the rustling, crackling noise that they make as they scramble through the bushes or climb over the stiff, dry blades of the Spanish bayonet. I think it is not an exaggeration to say that at almost any point on the Cuban trail between Guasimas and Siboney I could stand still for a moment and count from fifty to one hundred of them, crawling out of the forest and across the path. Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt told me that nothing interfered so much at first with his sleep in the field as the noise made by these crabs in the bushes. It is so like the noise that would be made by a party of guerrillas or bushwhackers, stealing up to the camp under cover of darkness, that it might well keep awake even a man who was neither nervous nor imaginative.