'clock
whistle had blown, and whole armies of little workmen swarmed across
all the landscape far below, and silence soon settled down save for the
dredges at Balboa that chug on through the night. But for myself the
hill was wholly unpeopled. A sturdy ocean breeze swept steadily across
it. The sinking sun set the jungle afire in a spot that would have
startled those who do not know that it rises in the Pacific at Panama,
crude, glaring colors glowed, fading to gentler and more delicate
tints, then the evening shadow that had climbed the hill with me spread
like a great black veil over all the world.

But the moon nearing its full followed almost on the heels of the
setting sun and, casting its half-day over a scene rich in nature and
history, invited the eye to swing clear round the hazy circle. Below
lay Panama dully rumbling with night traffic. Silent Ancon, still
better lighted, cuddled upon the lower skirts of the hill itself. Then
beyond, the curving bay, half seen, half guessed, with its long
promontory dying away into the hazy moonlit distance, lighted up here
and there by bush fires in the jungled hills. Some way out winked the
cluster of lights that marked Las Sabanas. In front, the placid
Pacific, the "South Sea" of the Spaniards, spread dimly away into the
void of night, its several islands seen only by the darker darkness
that marked where they lay.

On the other side of the hill the rumble of cranes and night labor came
up from Balboa dock. There, began the canal, which the eye could follow
away into the dim hilly inland distance--and come upon a great cluster
of lights that was Corozal, then another group that was Miraflores,
close followed by those of Pedro Miguel; and yet further, rising to
such height as to be almost indistinguishable from the lower stars the
lights of the negro cabins of upper Paraiso twinkled dimly above a
broad glow that was Paraiso itself. There the vista ended. For at
Paraiso the canal turns to the left for its plunge through Culebra
hill, and all that follows,--Empire, Cascadas, and far Gatun, was
visible only in the imagination.

If only the film of time might roll back and there pass again before
our eyes all that has come to pass within sight of Ancon hilltop.
Across the bay there, where now are only jungle-tangled ruins, Pizarro
set out with his handful of vagabonds to conquer South America; there
old Buccaneer Morgan laid his bloody hand. Back in the hills there men
died