he horizon as if awaiting the order to charge warned the Zone
to make merry while it might, for to-morrow it would surely rain--in
deluges. The lake, much higher now than in my former Gatun days, was
licking at the 27-foot level that morning. Under the brilliant blue sky
it looked like some vast unruffled mirror--which is no figure of
speech, but plain fact.

"Through a Forest in a Motor-boat" we might have dubbed the trip. We
had soon crossed the unbroken expanse of the lake and were moving
through a submerged forest. Splendid royal palms stood up to their
necks in the water, corpulent, century-old giants of the jungle stood
on tip-toe with their jagged noses just above the surface, gasping
their last. Great mango-trees laden with fruit were descending into the
flood. The lake was so mirror-like we could see the heads of drowning
palm-trees and the blue sky with its wisps of snow-white feathery
clouds as plainly below as above, so mirror-like the protruding stump
of a palm looked like a piece of just double that length and exactly
equal ends floating upright like a water thermometer, so reflective
that the broken end of a branch showing above the surface appeared to
be an acute angle of wood floating exactly at the angle in impossible
equilibrium.

Our prisoner and crew were from "Bahbaydos"--only you can't pronounce
it as he did, nor make the "a" broad enough, nor show the inside of
your red throat clear back to the soft palate to contrast with the
glistening black skin of your carefree, grinning face. Theoretically he
was being punished for assault and battery. But if this is punishment
to be sentenced to cruise around on Gatun Lake I wonder crime on the
Zone is so rare and unusual. This much I am sure, if I were in that
particular "Badgyan's" shoes--no, he had none; but his tracks, say--the
day my time ran out I should pick a quarrel with a Jamaican and leave
his countenance in such a condition that the judge could find no
grounds for a reasonable doubt in the matter.

We were mounting the river Trinidad. River, yes, but we followed it
only because it had kept back the jungle and left a way free of
tree-tops, not because there was not water enough anywhere, in any
direction, to float a boat of many times our draught. Turns so sharp we
rocked in our own wake; once we passed acres upon acres of big,
cod-like fish floating dead upon the water among the branches and the
forest rubbish. It seems the lake in rising spr