ched the stream, but at a bank
too sheer and bush-matted to descend. The third attempt brought me to
where the river made a graceful bend at my feet and I descended an
abrupt jungle bank to drink and stroll a bit along the stony shore;
then plunged in for a swim. It was just the right temperature, with
dense jungle banks on either side like great green unscalable walls,
the water clear and a bit over waist deep in the middle of the stream.
Now and then around the one or the other bend came a cayuca, the native
dug-out made of the hollowed trunk of a tree, usually the cedro--though
to a jungle native any tree is a "cedro" if he does not happen to think
of its right name. Twenty to thirty feet long, sometimes piled high
with vegetables, sometimes with several natives seated Indian file in
the bottom, the gunwales a bare two or three inches above the water,
they needed nice management, especially in the rapids below Cruces. The
locomotive power, generally naked to the waist, stood up in the craft
and climbed his polanca, or long pike pole, hand over hand, every naked
brown muscle in play, moving in perfect rhythm and apparent ease even
up-stream against the powerful current.

Soon after Chagres and trail parted company, the former to wind on up
through the jungle hills to its birthplace in the land of Darien and
wild Indians, the latter to strike for the Pacific. Over a mildly rough
country it led, down into tangled ravines, up over dense forested
hillocks where the jungle had been fought back by Uncle Sam and on the
brows of which I halted to drink of the fresh breeze sweeping across
from the Atlantic. All this time not a suggestion of anything Greek,
though I managed by some simple strategy to cast a sweeping glance into
every hovel along the way.

Then came the real Cruces trail--the rest only follows the general
direction. I fell upon it unexpectedly. It is still there as it was
when the Peruvian viceroys and their glittering trains clattered along
it, surprisingly well preserved; a cobbled way some three feet wide of
that rough and bumpy variety the Spaniard even to-day fancies a real
road, broken in places but still well marked, leading away southward
through the wilderness.

Overhead were tall spreading trees laden with blossomless orchids.
Under some of them was broad grassy shade; but the surrounding wall of
vegetation cut off all breeze. The way was intersected by many roads of
leaf-cutting ants, as level, wid