Martin's saloon last night."
From which important beginning I fell quickly back into the old
life again, derelicting about Gatun and vicinity by day, wandering
the nights away in black, noisy New Gatun and along the winding
back road under the cloud-scudding sky. Yet it was a different
life. Gatun had changed. Even her concrete light-house was winking
all night now up among the I. C. C. dwellings. The breeze from off
the Caribbean was heavy and lifeless. The landscape looked wet and
lush and rampant, of a deep-seated green, and instead of the
china-blue skies the dull, leaden-gray heavens seemed to hang low
and heavy overhead, like a portending fate. On the winding back
road the jungle trees still stood out against the night sky, at
times, too, there was a moon, but only a pale silver one that
peered weakly here and there through the scudding gray clouds. The
air grew more thick and sultry day by day, the heat was sticky,
the weather dripping, with the sun only an irregular whitish
blotch in the sky. Through the open windows the heavy, damp night
came miasmically floating in, the very cigarettes mildewed in my
pockets. Earth and air seemed heavy and toil-bowed by comparison
with other days. The jungle still hummed busily, yet, it seemed, a
bit mournfully as if preparing for production and unhilarious with
the task before it, like a woman first learning of her pregnancy.
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