CHAPTER XI FROM NEW MEXICO TO THE ISTHMUS
From the dry, bracing, upper air of Santa Fe, where you may ride for long without raising a moist particle on your brow, down to hot and humid New Orleans, where, without stirring a muscle, you perspire at all pores and your body flows away from you to the wide Mississippi; it is a striking climatic transit—the latitude is much the same, a difference of five degrees north, but there are seven thousand feet and the desert behind you; water's-edge, the Mississippi Delta, and the Gulf in front. From the pine sentinels of the mountains to the rank heat of the sugar plantations and the rice!
New Orleans in summer is hotter than Panama itself. Visitors on holiday from the American Panama territory complain of the heat, the mosquitoes, and the dirt, but revel in the shops, the sweets, and the Creole cooking.
"What is the most wonderful thing you saw in New Orleans?" I asked of a schoolgirl on the boat going to the Isthmus.
"The ten-cent store," she answered without hesitation.
"And did you have pralines?"
"I'll say I did."
Our boat, which accommodated chiefly Americans returning from vacation "back home," took five days over the serene blue Gulf of Mexico and across the no less serene, unwavering Caribbean from the great southern port to Colon. We passed the vague shadows of mountains in Yucatan; we stopped at a tiny tropic island to pick up a banana merchant who like Robinson Crusoe lived there with a good man Friday, a dog, and many goats. Other ships passed slowly on our horizon, trailing their smokes in the sky—many of them ships which had come through the Canal steaming from Chile and Peru, or looping the new loop from Los Angeles and the Pacific ports of Mexico—to New York. Passengers scanned each in turn with their glasses and made surmises of identification. As when at home they lived in the view of the slowly passing traffic of the Canal they had got to know many ships, and of these they spoke as of a sort of moving scenery of their home windows.
When the passing ship faded from the mind the passengers, and especially the children, would return to clamorous games of deck quoits. Rope rings on board and foam rings on the sea, foam rings and the rising of fish. The flying fish leaped like living silver out of the sparkling waters, and planed in air, and dipped and rose again in long traveling curves, keeping pace as it seemed with the speed of the ship.
All the passengers wore white and the ship itself was painted white. Everything was white except the faces and the hands of the colored stewards. They were mostly a dark mahogany. These black men, several of whom were from Dutch Guiana, gave perfect service, and one of them, my waiter, brought in every dish at dinner in a sort of cake walk step, keeping time to the records which another sedulously watched and changed whilst we ate.
The passengers, when they were not playing quoits, played cards. Their only conversation was of ships and men in the Canal Zone, of life they knew and others didn't, the sort of exclusive talk into which it is difficult for an outsider to enter. Nevertheless I obtained much useful information about the Isthmus and the jungle, though none could tell me of Balboa, except that he must have climbed the hill called Mount Balboa, up which picnic parties now go on Sundays to eat their luncheon. That hill of course was only named in honor of Balboa, yet it is strange how even denizens of the Zone will tell you it is the one he climbed.
As for the jungle outside the ten-mile-wide strip of United States territory, they told me many stories—of shooting expeditions, of men who never came back, of men who were liars who said they had penetrated into the interior. I learned for the first time of the "Forbidden Country" which is held against all comers by the Indians whose forefathers Balboa and his men fought and enslaved. I heard of the lost treasures which lie in that country; sacred treasures of Indians, lost treasures of the conquistadores, hidden loot of pirates of the Spanish Main, almost all now guarded by supernatural powers and the ghosts of those who once owned them.
The adventure of going into the jungle and climbing Balboa's peak began to take on a more parlous hue.
"Why not go to it by aëroplane?" I was asked. "The Colombia aërial post from Panama would take you without getting your feet wet." Quite an idea! It must be a beautiful sight from an aëroplane—the two oceans rolling gently towards one another, the attenuation of the two continents to the Isthmus, and the silver thread of the Canal.
With such thoughts the last day was fraught, and when I carried my knapsack out on the dry clean dock of Colon harbor, that quiet, unflurrying, unflurried place, I was much amused by the difference between a gilded imagining and bare reality. The Spanish Main is indeed changed to-day where the Stars and Stripes flies over it. There are perfect arrangements for the convenience of travelers—no haggling porters, touts, sharps, money changers, no bewildering noise, no excitement, but instead a laconic Customs officer chalking bags and trunks, a gateway, and a few horse cabs ready to take you anywhere for a shilling.