Never a mile without its town--how different
will all this be when the canal is finished and all this community
is gone to Alaska or has scattered itself again over the face of
the earth, and dense tropical solitude has settled down once more
over the scene.
Panama, they had said, is insupportably hot. Comparing it with
other lands I knew I could not but smile at the notion. Again it
was the lack of perspective. Sweat ran easily, yet so fresh the
air and so refreshing the breeze sweeping incessantly across from
the Atlantic that even the sweating was almost enjoyable. Hot!
Yes, like June on the Canadian border--though not like July. It is
hot in St. Louis on an August Sunday, with all the refreshment
doors tight closed--to strangers; hot in the cotton-fields of
Texas, but with these plutonic corners the heat of the Zone shows
little rivalry.
The way led round a cone-shaped hill crowned by another military
camp with the Stars and Stripes flapping far above, until I came
at last in sight of the renowned Chagres, seven miles above
Culebra, to all appearances a meek and harmless little stream
spanned by a huge new iron bridge and forbidden to come and play
in the unfinished canal by a little dam of earth that a steam-
shovel will some day eat up in a few hours. Here, where it ends
and the flat country begins, I descended into the "cut," dry and
waterless, with a stone-quarry bottom.
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