When that had been poured into the tank, we were off
across the ever-rising waters of Gatun Lake. For Gatun police
launch is one of those peculiar motor-boats that starts the same
day you had planned to.
It was such a day as could not have been bettered had it been made
to order, with a week to think out the details,--a dry-season day
even to the Atlantic breeze that goes with it, a sort of Indian
summer of the rainy season; though the heavy battalions of gray
clouds that hung all around the horizon as if awaiting the order
to charge warned the Zone to make merry while it might, for to-
morrow it would surely rain--in deluges. The lake, much higher now
than in my former Gatun days, was licking at the 27-foot level
that morning. Under the brilliant blue sky it looked like some
vast unruffled mirror--which is no figure of speech, but plain
fact.
"Through a Forest in a Motor-boat" we might have dubbed the trip.
We had soon crossed the unbroken expanse of the lake and were
moving through a submerged forest. Splendid royal palms stood up
to their necks in the water, corpulent, century-old giants of the
jungle stood on tip-toe with their jagged noses just above the
surface, gasping their last. Great mango-trees laden with fruit
were descending into the flood. The lake was so mirror-like we
could see the heads of drowning palm-trees and the blue sky with
its wisps of snow-white feathery clouds as plainly below as above,
so mirror-like the protruding stump of a palm looked like a piece
of just double that length and exactly equal ends floating upright
like a water thermometer, so reflective that the broken end of a
branch showing above the surface appeared to be an acute angle of
wood floating exactly at the angle in impossible equilibrium.
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