; some five
or six miles out in the open roadstead; and a few hull down beyond the
sharply drawn line of the eastern horizon. Three miles away to the
northwest the red-and-yellow flag of Spain was blowing out fitfully in
the land-breeze over the walls of the stone fort at Aguadores, and four
or five miles farther to the westward, at the end of the long, terraced
rampart, I could make out, with a glass, the lighthouse, the tile-roofed
barracks, and the gray battlements of the old castle at the entrance to
Santiago harbor.

About seven o'clock the _State of Texas_ got under way, steamed back to
Siboney, and succeeded in finding an anchorage, in what looked like a
very dangerous position, close to the rocks, on the eastern side of the
cove. From this point of view the picture presented by the village and
its environment was novel and interesting, if not particularly
beautiful. On the right and left of the slightly curved strip of sand
which formed the landing-place rose two steep bluffs to a height of
perhaps two hundred and fifty feet. The summit of the one on the right,
which was the steeper of the two, seemed, at first glance, to be
inaccessible; but there must have been a hidden path up to it through
the trees, bushes, and vines which clothed its almost precipitous face,
because it was crowned with one of the small, square, unpainted log
blockhouses which are a characteristic feature of almost every
east-Cuban landscape. The western bluff, from which the trees had been
cut away, sloped backward a little more than the other, and about
half-way up it, in a network of yellow intersecting paths, stood another
blockhouse, surrounded by a ditch and a circular "entanglement" of
barbed-wire fencing. At the foot of this bluff, and extending westward
under the precipitous declivity of the rampart, were two lines of
unpainted, one-story wooden houses, which stood gable to gable at
intervals of fifty or sixty feet, and looked, in their architectural
uniformity, like buildings erected by a manufacturing company to shelter
the families of its employees. The boundary of the village, at this end,
was marked by still another small, square blockhouse, which was set, at
a height of twenty feet, on a huge fragment of rock which had caved away
and fallen from the cliff above. Across the bottom of the ravine,
between the two bluffs, extended a thickly planted strip of
cocoanut-palms, whose gray trunks and drooping, feathery foliage served