There seemed no especial warrior class.  We noted that, it being one of the things it was ever in order to note.  No particular band of fighting men stood about that block of polished wood, that was essentially throne or chair of state.  The village owned slender, bone or flint-headed lances, but these rested idly in corners.  Upon occasion all or any might use them, but there was no evidence that those occasions came often.  There was no body of troops, nor armor, no shields, no crossbows, no swords.  They had knives, rudely made of some hard stone, but it seemed that they were made for hunting and felling and dividing.  No clothing hid from us any frame.  The cacique had about his middle a girdle of wrought cotton with worked ends and some of the women wore as slight a dress, but that was all.  They were formed well, all of them, lithe and slender, not lacking either in sinew and muscle, but it was sinew and muscle of the free, graceful, wild world, not brawn of bowman and pikeman and swordman and knight with his heavy lance.  In something they might be like the Moor when one saw him naked, but the Moor, too, was perfected in arms, and so they were not like.

We did not know as yet if ever there were winter in this land.  It seemed perpetual, serene and perfect summer.  Behind these huts ran small gardens wherein were set melons and a large pepper of which we grew fond, and a nourishing root, and other plants.  But the soil was rich, rich, and they loosened and furrowed it with a sharpened stick.  There were no great forest beasts to set them sternly hunting.  What then could give them toil?  Not gathering the always falling fruit; not cutting from the trees and drying the calabashes, great and small, that they used for all manner of receptacle; not drawing out with a line of some stouter fiber than cotton and with a hook of bone or thorn the painted fish from their crystal water!  To fell trees for canoes, to hollow the canoe, was labor, as was the building of their huts, but divided among so many it became light labor.  In those days we saw no Indian figure bowed with toil, and when it came it was not the Indian who imposed it.

But they swam, they rowed their canoes, they hunted in their not arduous fashion, they roved afar in their country at peace, and they danced.  That last was their fair, their games, their tourney, their pilgrimage, their processions to church, their attendance at mass, their expression of anything else that they felt altogether and at once!  It was like children’s play, renewed forever, and forever with zest.  But they did not treat it as play.  We had been showed dances in Concepcion and Isabella, but here in Cuba, in this inland town, Jerez and Luis and I were given to see a great and formal dance, arranged all in honor of us, gods descended for our own reasons to mix with men!  They danced in the square, but first they made us a feast with hutias and cassava and fish and fruit and a drink not unlike mead, exhilarating but not bestowing drunkenness.  Grapes were all over these lands, purple clusters hanging high and low, but they knew not wine.