up an inscribed headboard
to show who the dead men were, but some of their comrades had carefully
collected two or three hundred stones and pebbles--things not easy to
find in a tropical jungle--and had laid them close together on the
burial-mound in the form of a long cross.

Near this mound, and on the trail leading to it from Siboney, I saw, for
the first time, Cuban land-crabs, and formed the opinion, which
subsequent experience only confirmed, that they, with the bloody-necked
Cuban vultures, are the most disgusting and repellent of all created
things. Tarantulas, rattlesnakes, and some lizards are repulsive to the
eye and unpleasantly suggestive to the imagination; but the ugliest of
them all is not half so uncanny, hideous, and loathsome to me as the
Cuban land-crab. It resembles the common marine crab in form, and varies
in size from the diameter of a small saucer to that of a large
dinner-plate. Instead of being gray or brown, however, like its aquatic
relative, it is highly colored in diversified shades of red, scarlet,
light yellow, orange, and black. Sometimes one tint prevails, sometimes
another, and occasionally all of these colors are fantastically blended
in a single specimen. The creature has two long fore claws, or pincers;
small eyes, mounted like round berries on the ends of short stalks or
pedicels; and a mouth that seems to be formed by two horny, beak-like
mandibles. It walks or runs with considerable rapidity in any
direction,--backward, sidewise, or straight ahead,--and is sure to go in
the direction that you least expect. If you approach one, it throws
itself into what seems to be a defensive attitude, raises aloft its long
fore claws, looks at you intently for a moment, and then backs or sidles
away on its posterior legs, gibbering noiselessly at you with the horny
mandibles of its impish mouth, and waving its arms distractedly in the
air like a frightened and hysterical woman trying to keep off some
blood-chilling apparition.

All of these crabs are scavengers by profession and night-prowlers by
habit, and they do not emerge from their lurking-places in the jungle
and make their appearance on the trails until the sun gets low in the
west. Then they come out by the hundred, if not by the thousand; and as
it begins to grow dark, the still atmosphere of the deep, lonely forest
is filled with the rustling, crackling noise that they make as they
scramble through the bushes or climb over the stiff