pathetic resemblance to a shabby feather duster, and its trunk bends
and twists as though it had not the strength to push its way through
the air, and to hold itself erect. But the royal palm shoots up boldly
from the earth with the grace and symmetry of a marble pillar or the
white mast of a great ship. Its trunk swells in the centre and grows
smaller again at the top, where it is hidden by great bunches of green
plumes, like monstrous ostrich feathers that wave and bow and bend in
the breeze as do the plumes on the head of a beautiful woman. Standing
isolated in an open plain or in ranks in a forest of palms, this tree
is always beautiful, noble and full of meaning. It makes you forget the
ugly iron chimneys of the _centrals_, and it is the first and the
last feature that appeals to the visitor in Cuba.

But since the revolution came to Cuba the beauty of the landscape is
blotted with the grim and pitiable signs of war. The sugar cane has
turned to a dirty brown where the fire has passed through it, the
_centrals_ are black ruins, and the adobe houses and the railroad
stations are roofless, and their broken windows stare pathetically at
you like blind eyes. War cannot alter the sunshine, but the smoke from
the burning huts and the blazing corn fields seems all the more sad and
terrible when it rises into such an atmosphere, and against so soft and
beautiful a sky.

People frequently ask how far the destruction of property in Cuba is
apparent. It is so far apparent that the smoke of burning buildings is
seldom absent from the landscape. If you stand on an elevation it is
possible to see from ten to twenty blazing houses, and the smoke from
the cane fields creeping across the plain or rising slowly to meet the
sky. Sometimes the train passes for hours through burning districts,
and the heat from the fields along the track is so intense that it is