his language, and, pantomimically wringing the
perspiration out of my front hair, I remarked in Russian that it was
_zharko_ (hot). Encouraged by what he took for sympathetic and
responsive profanity on my side, he scowled fiercely and exclaimed,
"Mucha sol--damn!" whereupon we smiled reciprocally and felt much
cooler.

We crept slowly down the eastern side of the bay, past the conical hill
crowned with a cubical blockhouse which marks the southern boundary of
the city, around the end of the long iron trestle of the Juragua Iron
Company, past the flat-topped mesa on which stands the harbor
signal-station, and finally into the narrow neck of the Santiago
water-bottle which Hobson vainly tried to cork with the collier
_Merrimac_. From this point of view we could see, between the steep
bluffs which form the entrance to the bay, a narrow strip of blue,
sunlit ocean, and on its left the massive gray bastions of Morro Castle,
projecting in a series of huge steps, like ledges or terraces of natural
rock, from the crest of the eastern promontory.

All the maps of Santiago harbor that I have seen show another castle,
called Socapa, nearly opposite Morro on the western side of the channel;
but I have never been able to discover it. If it still exists, it must
be in ruins and so overgrown with vegetation as to be completely hidden.
The only fortification I could find on that side of the bay is the
so-called "western battery," a recently constructed earthwork situated
on the crest of the long, flat-topped hill which forms the outer
coast-line. This earthwork could never have been known as a "castle"; it
is at least three hundred yards west of the point indicated on the map
as the site of Socapa, and it cannot be seen at all from the channel, or
even from the highest parapet of Morro. Unless Socapa Castle, therefore,
is so small and inconspicuous as to have escaped my notice, it must have
fallen into ruins or been destroyed. There is no castle on the western
side of the entrance now that can be seen from the water, from the
Estrella battery, or from Morro.

After passing Cayo Smith, the sunken collier _Merrimac_, and the
dismantled wreck of the _Reina Mercedes_, we turned abruptly to the
left, opposite the Estrella battery, and entered a deep, sheltered
cove, directly behind the Morro promontory and almost under the massive
walls of the castle itself. Landing at a little wooden pier on the
northern side of the miniature bay, I wa