A broad
cement and grass promenade runs atop, wide as an American street.
Thirty or forty feet below the low parapet sounds the deep, time-
mellowed voice of the Pacific, as there rolls higher and higher up
the rock ledges that great tide so different from the scarcely
noticeable one at Colon. The summer breeze never dies down, never
grows boisterous. On the landward side Panama lies mumbling to
itself, down in the hollow between squats Chiriqui prison with its
American warden, once a Zone policeman; while in the round stone
watch-towers on the curving parapets lean prison guards with fixed
bayonets and incessantly blow the shrill tin whistles that is the
universal Latin-American artifice for keeping policemen awake. On
the way back to the city the elite--or befriended--may drop in at
the University Club at the end of the wall for a cooling libation.
On Sunday night comes the band concert in the palm-ringed
Cathedral Plaza. There is one on Thursday, too, in Plaza Santa
Ana, but that is packed with all colors and considered "rather
vulgah." In the square by the cathedral the aggregate color is far
lighter. Pure African blood hangs chiefly in the outskirts. Then
the haughty aristocrats of Panama, proud of their own individual
shade of color, may be seen in the same promenade with American
ladies--even a garrison widow or two--from out along the line.
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