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The bride and bridegroom appeared amidst a throng of gamins who were shouting at the top of their lungs; the groom looked like a dry goods clerk; she, emaciated and ugly, looked like a monkey; the best man and the bridesmaids followed after, and in this group a fat old lady, flat-nosed, cross-eyed, white-haired, with a red rose in her hair and a guitar in her hand, advanced with a flamenco air.
The chronometer of Louis Berthoud having kept time accurately at the Havannah, I availed myself of this occasion to determine, on this and the following days, the positions of Cayo de Don Cristoval, Cayo Flamenco, Cayo de Diego Perez and Cayo de Piedras. I also employed myself in examining the influence which the changes at the bottom of the sea produce on its temperature at the surface.
And beside all these are the blind fiddlers, scraping out old-fashioned tunes that were popular thirty years ago; the guitarists, singing the flamenco songs which have been sung in Spain ever since the Moorish days; the buffoons, who extract tunes from a broomstick; the owners of performing dogs. They are a picturesque lot, neither vicious nor ill-humoured.
We must not confound with this limestone of Guines, sometimes porous, sometimes compact, another formation so recent that it seems to augment in our days. I allude to the calcareous agglomerates, which I saw in the islands of Cayos that border the coast between the Batabano and the bay of Xagua, principally south of the Cienega de Zapata, Cayo Buenito, Cayo Flamenco and Cayo de Piedras.
The chairs were taken by all the lesser fry, by stout mothers, dragons attendant on dark-eyed girls, and their lovers in broad hats, in all the gala array of the flamenco. There was a joyous clamour of speech and laughter; the voices of Spanish women are harsh and unrestrained; the park sparkled with colour, and the sun caught the fluttering of countless fans.
It appears common enough, on the coast of Tabasco and Honduras, at the mouths of rivers, to find the manatees swimming in the sea, as crocodiles do sometimes. Dampier distinguishes between the fresh-water and the salt-water manatee. Half a mile east of Cayo Flamenco we passed close to two rocks on which the waves break furiously.
On the boundary of a sort of gulf between Cayo Flamenco and Cayo de Piedras we found that the temperature of the sea, at its surface, augmented suddenly from 23.5 to 25.8 degrees centigrade.
After the supper they drank cognac and brandy, the priest played the guitar, Irene danced sevillanas with less grace than a bricklayer, as the landlady said; the Superman sang some fados that he had learned in Portugal, and the Biscayan, not to be outdone, burst forth into some malaguenas that might just as well have been a cante flamenco or the Psalms of David.
On the morning of the 11th March we visited Cayo Flamenco. I found the latitude 21 degrees 59 minutes 39 seconds. The centre of this island is depressed and only fourteen inches above the surface of the sea. The water here is brackish while in other cayos it is quite fresh.
Its flowers emit an agreeable perfume; and it is the ornament of Cayo Flamenco, Cayo Piedras and perhaps of the greater part of the low lands of the Jardinillos. While we were employed in herborizing,* our sailors were searching among the rocks for lobsters.
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