bushes, and low trees that bordered this road was bright with
flowers, among which I noticed the white spider-lily (apparently a
variety of _Cleome pungens_), the so-called "Cuban rose" (a flower that
flaunts the scarlet and yellow of the Spanish flag and looks a little
like _Potentilla la Vesuve_), and a beautiful climbing vine with large
violet blossoms which resembled in shape and color the butterfly-pea
(_Centrosema_).

In and out among these plants and bushes ran nimble lizards of at least
half a dozen different kinds: lizards that carried their tails curled up
over their backs like pug-dogs; lizards that amused themselves by
pushing out a whitish, crescent-shaped protuberance from under their
throats and then drawing it in again; lizards that changed color while I
watched them; and big gray iguanas, two or three feet in length, which,
although perfectly harmless, looked ugly and malevolent enough to be
classed with Cuban land-crabs and tarantulas. I saw no animals except
these lizards, and no birds except the soaring vultures, which are never
absent from Cuban skies, and which hang in clouds over every
battle-field, fort, city, and village on the island.

The road from the head, of the Estrella cove to the crest of the Morro
promontory forks at a distance of seventy-five or one hundred yards from
the cable-house, one branch of it turning to the left and climbing a
steep grade to the summit of the ridge east of the castle, where stand
the lighthouse and the barracks, while the other branch goes straight on
in a rising slant to a rocky buttress situated almost perpendicularly
over the point where the southern shore of the cove intersects the
eastern margin of the harbor channel. Turning to the left around this
buttress, it runs horizontally southward along a shelf-like cornice in
the face of the precipice until it reaches a spacious terrace, or
esplanade, cut out of the solid rock, at a height of one hundred and
fifty feet above the water. This terrace, which is on the western face
of the castle and directly under its lower bastions, seems to have been
intended originally for a gun-platform, but there is nothing there now
to indicate that guns were ever mounted on it. It has no parapet, or
battlement, and is merely a wide, empty shelf of rock, overhanging the
narrow entrance to the harbor, and overhung, in turn, by the walls of
the fortress. In the mountain-side back of it are four or five
quadrangular apertures, w