At sunset that evening the Riders buried their dead, in a long single grave lined with palm-leaves, on a breezy hill-side overlooking the scene of their victory. The laying to rest of these comrades, who only a few hours before, had been so full of life with all its hopes and ambitions, was the most impressive ceremony in which any of the survivors had ever engaged. It strengthened their loyalty and devotion to each other and to their cause as nothing else could have done, and as the entire command gathered close about the open grave to sing "Nearer my God to Thee," many a voice was choked with feelings too solemn for expression, and many a sun-tanned cheek was wet with tears. The camp of the Rough Riders was very quiet that night, and the events of the day just closed were discussed in low tones, as though in fear of awakening the sleepers on the near-by hill-side. After the fight of Las Guasimas, its heroes rested and waited for six days, while the remainder of the army effected its landing and made its slow way to the position they had won over the narrow trails they had cleared. These days of waiting were also days of vast discomfort, and the patient endurance of drenching tropical rains and steaming heat, the wearing of the same battle-soiled clothing day after day and night after night, and, above all, of an ever-present hunger, that sapped both strength and spirits. They had started out with but three days' rations, and four days passed before a scanty supply of hard-tack, bacon, and coffee began to dribble into camp. The road to Siboney, flooded by constant rains, bowlder-strewn, and inches deep in mud, was for a long time impassable to wagons; and during those six days such supplies of food and ammunition as reached the idle army were brought to it by three trains of pack-mules that toiled ceaselessly back and forth between the coast and the front, bringing the barest necessities of life, but nothing more. So the American army suffered and prayed to be led forward, while the Spaniards between them and Santiago strengthened their own position with every hour, and confidently awaited their coming. The invaders now occupied the Sevilla plateau, and were within five miles of the city they sought to capture. In their front lay a broad wooded valley, to them an unknown region, and on its farther side rose a range of hills, that Ridge Norris told them were the San Juan Heights, strongly protected by block-houses, rifle-pits, and bewildering entanglements of barbed wire, a feature of modern warfare now appearing for the first time in history. With their glasses, from the commanding eminence of El Poso Hill, crowned with the ruined buildings of an abandoned plantation, the American officers could distinctly see the Spaniards at work on their intrenchments a mile and a half away, and note the ever-lengthening lines of freshly excavated earth.