Jagged rocks had made our tires suffer and we were not well supplied with extras. “Cuba,” returning to Havana, carried word to the garage there to ship new tires to us at Santa Clara. As we followed the blue print out of town, our conversation dwelt on the river. Slowly and laboriously picking our way toward the wide, deep gorge in which the dreaded stream itself was hidden, we schemed out a lot of things that would have been a credit to Robinson Crusoe and other noted performers of bogus engineering feats. Our favorite plan was an immense raft of palm trunks, it being agreed that, if we worked all night, we could probably get the raft ready to float by morning. We came upon the river unexpectedly, our first intimation of its whereabouts being three bare piers sticking above the bluff and telling of the destructive march of Weyler through a province that once had boasted a few century-old bridges. Then we saw the river. It was as dry as the top of a hill, a fair sample of the many valleys floored with nothing but rocks of volcanic roughness. It was marvelous that the tires were not literally torn from the rims and that the twisted wheels and groaning frame did not weaken under the strenuous task. Having crossed so much rock, we argued that surely nothing worse could be ahead. We began to gain confidence in ourselves and to lose confidence in Cuban information. When the government engineer of a province did not know that a river a few miles from his office was only full of water in the wet season, we concluded that the mere prophecies of provincials were not worth worrying about. Ambling along until nightfall, we often crossed fields where it was easier to take a roundabout way than to try to follow the trail. Slowly we drove under the everlasting palms and among the boulders half-hidden in the luxuriant grass. The war had bled fast and furiously around here. Stone houses of the Spanish period all were gone or stood in ruins, dim pages in the history of minor battles which never will be written. The country had blossomed again. The red flambollan, the stately sugar cane, and the fast-growing bananas had wiped the stain away, but thatch-roofed huts replaced the old Spanish houses which once reared picturesquely in wild regions. For miles the road would be marked by wavering stone fences, but there was nothing between these fences to show that it had been used since the war or that it ever had been anything else than the rock-strewn virgin soil. Sometimes the grass grew as high as the car. Sometimes the fences would be long lines of palms, framing a magnificent vista of miles upon miles that ended in the blue, blue hills at the horizon. Had there been a road between these fences or between these palms, Mercury himself could have asked no better speedway.