all this, though it failed to take his attention wholly from the
wonders of the landscape that slipped by on either side. It was
his first glimpse of tropic vegetation, and he used his eyes to
good advantage, while he listened politely to his informant.

The matted thickets, interlaced with vine and creeper, were all
ablaze with blossoms, for this was the wet season, in which nature
runs riot. Great trees of strange character rose out of the
tangle, their branches looped with giant cables and burdened with
flowering orchids or half hidden beneath other parasites. On every
hand a vegetable warfare was in progress--a struggle for existence
in which the strong overbore the weak--and every trunk was
distorted by the scars of the battle. Birds of bright plumage
flashed in the glades, giant five-foot lizards scuttled away into
the marshes or stared down from the overhanging branches. A vivid
odor of growing, blooming herbage reached the nostrils.

Just as Kirk had made up his mind that he could sit and watch this
brilliant panorama forever, the jungle suddenly fell away, and the
car sped up through low, grass-clad hills into a scattered city
flung against the side of a wide valley. There was no sign here of
Latin America; this was Yankeeland through and through. The
houses, hundreds upon hundreds of them, were of the typical Canal
Zone architecture, double-galleried and screened from foundation
to eaves, and they rambled over the undulating pasture land in a
magnificent disregard of distance. Smooth macadam roads wound back
and forth, over which government wagons rolled, drawn by sleek
army mules; flower gardens blazed forth in gorgeous colors; women
and children, all clean and white and American, were sitting upon
the porches or playing in the yards. Everywhere was a military