Above the palms around the square arose the dim, white facade of the Cathedral, with the bronze statue of Anduella the liberator of Olancho, who answered with his upraised arm and cocked hat the cheers of an imaginary populace.
"Twenty years had gone by since Dick had received the impression that wrote those lines, and now sometimes after dinner half a long cigar would burn out as he mused over the picture and the dreams that had gone between.

From one long silence he said: 'I think I'll come back here this winter and bring Mrs.Davis with me--stay a couple of months.' What a fine compliment to a wife to have the thought of her and that plan emerge from that deep and romantic background.
"The picture people began their film with a showing of the 'mountains which jutted out into the ocean and suggested roughly the five knuckles of a giant's hand clenched and lying flat upon the surface of the water.' That formation of the sea wall is just outside of Santiago.
'The waves tunnelled their way easily enough until they ran up against those five mountains and then they had to fall back.' How natural for one of us to be unimpressed by such a feature of the landscape and yet how characteristic of Dick Davis to see the elemental fight that it recorded and get the hint for the whole of the engineering struggle that is so much of his book.
"We went over those mountains together, where two decades before he had planted his banner of romance.

We visited the mines and the railroads and everywhere found some superintendent or foreman or engineer who remembered Davis.

He had guessed at nothing.

Everywhere he had overlaid the facts with adventure and with beauty, but he had been on sure footing all the time.