were still being disembarked in the surf, and two ships of war had
their searchlights turned on the landing-place, and made Siboney as
light as a ball-room. Back of the searchlights was an ocean white
with moonlight, and on the shore red camp-fires, at which the half-
drowned troops were drying their uniforms, and the Rough Riders, who
had just marched in from Baiquiri, were cooking a late supper, or
early breakfast of coffee and bacon. Below the former home of the
Spanish comandante, which General Wheeler had made his head-quarters,
lay the camp of the Rough Riders, and through it Cuban officers were
riding their half-starved ponies, and scattering the ashes of the
camp-fires. Below them was the beach and the roaring surf, in which
a thousand or so naked men were assisting and impeding the progress
shoreward of their comrades, in pontoons and shore boats, which were
being hurled at the beach like sleds down a water chute.

It was one of the most weird and remarkable scenes of the war,
probably of any war. An army was being landed on an enemy's coast at
the dead of night, but with the same cheers and shrieks and laughter
that rise from the bathers at Coney Island on a hot Sunday. It was a
pandemonium of noises. The men still to be landed from the "prison
hulks," as they called the transports, were singing in chorus, the
men already on shore were dancing naked around the camp-fires on the
beach, or shouting with delight as they plunged into the first bath
that had offered in seven days, and those in the launches as they
were pitched head-first at the soil of Cuba, signalized their arrival
by howls of triumph. On either side rose black overhanging ridges,
in the lowland between were white tents and burning fires, and from
the ocean came the blazing, dazzling eyes of the search-lights
shaming the quiet moonlight.