Disgusted with falls backward and falls forward, with mud, with rain, with revengeful beating of their mules, with the whole Cruces Road, our friends are indisposed to admire the luxuriance of the forest, the noble trees of its open glades, the gleams of glowing sunlight through its rain-spangled vine-tracery, the dewy darkness of its moss-covered rock alleys, the glimpse of a far-reaching expanse of dark, untrodden woods.
But mule exercise like this is appetizing; our party are hungry. They stop at a hut decorated with many bottles, bearing classic names, and, not waiting to cast a glance of laughing admiration upon the plantain-fed, cherubic rotundity of the naked urchins, José Marco, José Maria, and José Manuel, who toddle out, they ask for something to eat. All the oranges, all the bananas, all the chickens, all the eggs of the two first classes, are carried off by previous passers. There are still a few third-class eggs, boiling eggs; but on being brought, these are found to be impregnated with a perfume not esteemed in Yankee land, except when public characters already in bad odor are to be further anointed. There is nothing edible except a few rolls of dry-as-dust bread, washed down, perhaps, by a bottle of ale or beer, the nectar of the Isthmus, bearing the unfalsified names of Worthy Bass, Byass, Muir, Tennent, or Whitbread.
With this momentary refreshment onward goes our party. Wearily they plunge through the yellow mud of La Sanbujedora, and emerge yellow; wearily through the blue-black mud of La Ramona, and come out blue-black over yellow; wearily through many-tinted muds, each of which, like a picture-restorer, deposits a new layer of ugliness upon the original, until the original has to be scraped like an old picture to find out the fond. The gentlemen have long ago thrown away their india-rubber coats, and the umbrellas of the ladies have left their last gore upon the briers. In general, the whole party are fit subjects for a chiffonnier, if he would deign to insert his hook into such a mass of mud.
At last the fresh-flowing waters of the Cardenas announce their approach to Panama. They wash away their masks of mud to perceive the exquisite beauty of the tree-embowered ford. Then by the park-like savannas, which they are too tired to see, through the gayety of the suburb Caledonia, which they consider very mal-apropos, across the drawbridge never drawn, under the rusty gateway, they enter and bury themselves in the discomforts of Panama.
In the evening perhaps they take the air upon the Battery, are désorientés by finding the Pacific lying eastward instead of westward. They think everything looks very shabby, and totally unlike the staring newness of a Yankee town. They sleep in an Americanized caravansary; are lulled by the murmur of returned Californian curses, that permeates the house; dream of the alligators and boa-constrictors they ought to have seen. Nightmare comes to them in the shape of the mules they have bestrode. Next morning, wakened by the clinking of the cathedral’s cracked bells, the gentlemen invert their boots to search for scorpions, and the ladies regret that they have anticipated mosquitoes, as one would wish to do strawberries, by three months.
They take boat for the steamer, allow themselves to be bullied and cheated by the boatmen almost as much as strangers in London and New York are by cabmen. Mutual condolences and mutual congratulations are exchanged with the other passengers. Mutual exaggerations of dangers passed and dangers feared are held up for mutual admiration.
All are completely unconscious that not a hundred miles from Panama is a most charming country, a veritable Arcadia.
The Bay
The residents of Panama think no more of the slight fevers of the country, than we do of a severe cold or influenza. You call to pay morning compliments to a lady with whom you have had a passage of arms at the ball of the evening before, and are told quietly that she teine calenturas (has the fever), and is not visible. In a day or two she reappears, undimmed. The fevers of the gentlemen only come on, like colds at a college, when they have unpleasant duties to perform.
Northern constitutions are more impressionable. They melt like an iceberg under the equator. After my second calentura and concomitant quinine, my head felt like a prizefighter’s which has been in chancery. I determined to recruit in a furlough of a fortnight. A couple of friends were going somewhere up the Isthmus. I agreed to join them. We were to take canoe that evening at the turn of the tide. I hastily tumbled together my traps, and borrowing a hammock, and trusting to fortune for want of a friend, was soon ready on the Playa Grande, near the smooth, broad sands of the north beach.
A traveller arriving from the Atlantic side of the Isthmus, with eyes wide open to stare, as Balboa did, at the Pacific, stares wider, when he finds it at Panama to the east instead of the west; and as he sees the sun come up over the softly-glowing bay, he fancies that Pboebus must have been making a night of it, the night before, among the “glorious Apollers,” and turned out of the wrong side of his bed. He is half persuaded that, after all the toils of his trans-Isthmian travel, he has only wandered about as one does in the labyrinths of a tropical forest, and has been brought back to the shores of the tumultuous, keel-vexed, practical Atlantic, instead of looking out upon the sea that washes the shores of Inde and Cathay, the ocean of imagination and hope. So unexpected, also, is the turn of the coast, that, in order to go north to California, you must steer almost due south for a hundred miles. The points of the compass are as much reversed as social position in the golddiggings.
But as ex post facto narratives are doubtless unconstitutional in Yankee literature, let me proceed regularly; and while I am waiting for the tide to rise its twenty-three feet, and cover the conchological mud and crustaceous reef of the Bay, let me speak of the Bay, — this beautiful Bay of the tropics! How often at night, awakened by the tap of Marcellino at my door with the news of a steamer at hand, have I embarked and hastened out upon the water. It would be perhaps an hour before day, but still night, — a night of clear, soft, yet brilliant star light; and there the stars do not glitter with the steely sharpness of a northern sky, but glow; they do not snap out a lively twinkle, but slowly flicker and sway; their light grows upon the eye, as the light of a revolving lighthouse across a stretch of sea. The cool night-breeze would be breathing over the water, freshening as the dawn came on. Wreaths of mist were floating away on the mainland and clinging to the mountainous points of the bay, where perhaps too a black rain-cloud lay lowering. For each climate are its own atmospheric beauties. Nowhere but in England and the Low Countries should you study effects of sunlight through mist and rain-clouds. There is no purple in the world like the purple of Hymettus. Never but at a Florentine sunset can you touch light made tangible, and grasp it, and bathe in it, and be upborne by it. Nowhere else can you see that veil of palpitating azure that flows down after sunset to the Lake of Geneva from the summit of the Jura, the inmost spirit of light making the very peaks transparent. The snow cones of Oregon rise against a background of blue unequalled in depth and brilliancy. In the tropics, and most exquisite at Panama, before sunrise and after sunset there spreads upward from the horizon a violet flush, full of soft glow, vivid with suppressed light.
It is pleasant to look down upon anything or anybody; and the lower one has been, the more delightful becomes the consciousness of present elevation. The age of balloons and bird’s-eye views will develop human vanity to an insufferable degree. But some of our pleasures from looking down have a different origin. A view like this was only meant to be seen from a certain height; it lacks picturesqueness and the necessary features of foreground scenery; it is panoramic in its nature. We will draw it along slowly before the eyes of the reader, interspersing the representation with remarks à la Banvard. Land and water are the chief objects we behold; land oscillating and undulating into hills covered with deep, rich verdure of the tropics, and water blue and clear, with its waves marked only by shifting color, that shoots over the smooth seeming surface, — the ανηριθμον γελασμα of the ocean. The land is the Isthmus of Panama, a narrow bank between two worlds of sea,