THE HOTEL COJIMAR—aquamarine walls blotted with mildew—was in one of the plazas that made oases of light in Havana’s labyrinth of narrow, shadowed arteries. The boys ate chicken and rice in a cheap bodega and slept all together in a tiny room where small lizards clung to the walls and a single window overlooked an enclosed courtyard into which clay gutters spilled the evening’s rain. In the morning, they went to a coffee shop and drank café con leche, thickly sugared to kill their appetites, and then walked to the legation, where Joseph told them that no reply to their cable had been received, and so they wandered about, killing time, fighting anxiety and the melancholy that descended when they thought of how Will would have delighted in the city—the sensuous women, some in fancy dresses, some in the peasant shifts that Elvira and Rosaria wore, the pastel buildings with scrolled iron balconies and bars on the windows, which reminded Eliot of a menagerie and made Nathaniel think of the cities described in Don Quixote. Carriages driven by booted Negroes, whipping the horses unmercifully, clattered down the stone streets, and mules, so laden with fodder that all that could be seen of them were tiny hooves, stepped daintily along. At noon, they came upon a donkey carrying panniers of oranges, and they asked the driver if they could buy some, but he could not understand them nor they him, until Nathaniel showed him a quarter, and money being a universal language, the man sold them three oranges, which did for lunch.

Returning to the legation at one, they were told that a reply still had not come in and to try again in a couple of hours, when all the cable traffic had been sorted and filed. Speculating on the reasons for their father’s silence, but coming to no satisfactory conclusion and suspecting they might have to find their own way home, they went to the harbor to check on the possibilities of hiring on board an American ship bound for Boston or someplace near. Across the harbor rose Moro Castle, its ramparts running along a rocky hill and dipping into ravines, blending so smoothly into the rock that the walls did not appear to have been built upon it but hewn from it. There were many ships, steam and sail, flying the ensigns of many nations, all discharging waste into the harbor, which, with its modest tides, stank like a landlocked bog. Eliot spotted a Standard Fruit Company steamer, but the second mate told them she had a full crew. He directed them to a down-easter, the sight of which made them almost cry with homesickness. The ship needed hands, but she was bound for Caracas, and the wrecking sloop moored nearby, out of Key West, had only one berth open; besides, she was headed for a salvage job in the Bahamas.