SEE PAGE 58.] [Illustration] CHAPTER IV _Magnum iter adscendo; sed dat mihi gloria vires._ —Propertius. [Illustration] All ruts, except those made by ox carts, are merely imitations. The country through which we were passing soaks water like a sponge in the wet season. It dries quickly. When the red soil is soft, the immense, heavily-laden carts sink into and cut gashes three or four feet deep in the face of the earth. These parallel, intersect, and cross one another. There is only one way to drive a car over them; that is to always keep the wheels on the high spots. Sometimes the high spot may be wide; sometimes narrow as the wheel; sometimes it may be the sloping side of a gully. On these ruts and on the rocks we tore tires off the wheels at two miles an hour. From Tosca to Macagua is sixty miles of ruts. As we left the region where the road is over bare rock, we began to work into a region where the ruts alternate with mud. For a short distance the ground had been untraversed for a long time, and was hard and fairly smooth. We enjoyed the rare experience of “beating it,” which down there meant eighteen to twenty miles an hour. This respite from the usual difficulties was brief, for the road finally became merely an opening between sugar fields. The cane, sweeping the car on either side, rose far above our heads and for many miles it was never possible to see in front of us farther than a few hundred yards. Leaving the sugar cane for short drives over open ground, we noticed that this must have been a particularly patriotic section during the fighting with Spain. Most of the scattered houses were of stone or boards, calcimined white, light blue, or yellow, and nearly each one bore the roughly painted sign: “Viva Cuba Libre.” Lunch was eaten in a street café at Colon, and while there we became acquainted with the four-hundred of a typical inland city. Politicians in such localities bear reputable names socially and lead the village society. We needed gasoline and were told that there was a private supply owned by a man who was then at the home of the mayor, on the outskirts, where the beaux and belles of Colon had been invited to a dinner party by his honor. We were asked to join the festivities, but excused ourselves and took the oil monopolist back to the town that he might sell us one of his precious ten-gallon cans of gasoline.