Panama, they had said, is insupportably hot. Comparing it with
other lands I knew I could not but smile at the notion. Again it
was the lack of perspective. Sweat ran easily, yet so fresh the
air and so refreshing the breeze sweeping incessantly across from
the Atlantic that even the sweating was almost enjoyable. Hot!
Yes, like June on the Canadian border--though not like July. It is
hot in St. Louis on an August Sunday, with all the refreshment
doors tight closed--to strangers; hot in the cotton-fields of
Texas, but with these plutonic corners the heat of the Zone shows
little rivalry.

The way led round a cone-shaped hill crowned by another military
camp with the Stars and Stripes flapping far above, until I came
at last in sight of the renowned Chagres, seven miles above
Culebra, to all appearances a meek and harmless little stream
spanned by a huge new iron bridge and forbidden to come and play
in the unfinished canal by a little dam of earth that a steam-
shovel will some day eat up in a few hours. Here, where it ends
and the flat country begins, I descended into the "cut," dry and
waterless, with a stone-quarry bottom. A sharp climb out on the
opposite side and I plunged into rampant jungle, half expecting
snake-bites on my exposed ankles--another pre-conceived notion--
and at length falling into a narrow jungle trail that pitched down
through a dense-grown gully, came upon a fenced compound with
several Zone buildings on the banks of the Chagres, down to which
sloped a broad green lawn.

Here dwells hale and ruddy "Old Fritz," for long years keeper of
the fluviograph that measures and gives warning of the rampages of
the Chagres. Fritz will talk to you in almost any tongue you may