5
Religious geography is part of the art of living. To come to each new place on the chart called Earth, not in a spirit of mere jollity but with some reverence, gives a richness to life. Whilst some seek gold, others seek spiritual gold, the soul's possession, which is neither sentimental nor unreal but is indeed the one substance out of which in the beginning all things were made.
The apology of a world traveler that he did not see the Pacific before, from the heights of Tehuantepec, from the Golden Gate of San Francisco, from the stone eminence of the new city of Panama—he preferred to see it with Balboa's eyes, climbing a peak out of the jungle and looking also, and in like manner for the first time, in that way to perform a geographical rite in the world temple.
I traveled with Cecilie Lucarez and Victor Morales. One carried my pack and a gun; the other with his long knife slashed the passage clear of jungle growth. It was icy cold and burning hot at the same time, dank and steaming; perspiration soaked even through the leather of one's knee boots, but small cold airs crept out of the profound green shadow on either hand, chilling for moments the very marrow. Underfoot were innumerable water currents and mud and slime, and the giant trees above us dripped water all the while. A grave-like coldness crept about everywhere, and now and then a draught of air would lift my wet shirt and make it flap against the skin. Yet it was burning hot.
The Spaniards plunged across the isthmus in chain mail; I was in my shirt, my guides were without even a shirt. How the Conquistadores did it in complete armor gives a measure of the physical endurance of these men.
The ground is strewn with rotting yellow plums which have fleshy centers and bittersweet taste; monkeys hang from the trees looking at us, parrots innumerable flutter about the open spaces. And when we come to open spaces, how painful the sun! I am dazzled by the gleaming points of my eyelashes, eyes want to get right in, temples throb.
It is easier to cross the isthmus in January or February, the dry season, but Balboa crossed it in the wet. It is his September, and rains every day, as no doubt it did then. Up to the knees in soft mud, up to the waist in water each day, and the feet all swollen and broken by the treatment. The guides, with their bare feet and legs, seemed able to take the floods more easily, and Morales in mid-stream of a rushing torrent, with my knapsack balanced on his head and his gun on top of that, whilst water foamed against his bare breast—is a sight not easily forgotten. Apprehension of a lost knapsack stamped it on the mind.
We rested in a jungle village. I sat on a clay floor with a wild monkey on a string and noisy children and scarcely less noisy parrots. We were regaled with Kola wine and grated coconut and oil and rice and bits of fat pork and some of the ugliest preserves I have ever encountered. It was the time of the rice crop, and rice in the husk was drying in baskets in every little palm-leaf hut. Every hour the women took the rice baskets and shook them to help dry out the grain. Next day an aged Negro with grizzled wool led me on, and we found in the depths of the thicket that which I could not follow from Nombre de Dios—part of the Camino Real, now moss-covered and green, but unmistakable, a massive cobbling of large stones with a lateral, upturned stone along the edge for curb, just room for a panniered ass and no more, but now so overgrown in places that even a monkey could not pass on it. Trees have shot up and split the cobbling, the scrub has met over it, and for many miles it climbs amid the mahogany trees high up into the mountains.
It would be worth while for some one to employ natives and spend a month cutting clear and tracing this great treasure trail all the way from coast to coast. For there must have been resting places and perhaps even taverns upon it, and possibly a chapel half way.