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.