and consumed five hot and stifling hours in covering twenty-five miles.

[Illustration: One of the Forts along the Trocha-From a photograph
taken by Mr. Davis]

The trocha is a cleared space, one hundred and fifty to two hundred
yards wide, which stretches for fifty miles through what is apparently
an impassable jungle. The trees which have been cut down in clearing
this passageway have been piled up at either side of the cleared space
and laid in parallel rows, forming a barrier of tree trunks and roots
and branches as wide as Broadway and higher than a man's head. It would
take a man some time to pick his way over these barriers, and a horse
could no more do it than it could cross a jam of floating logs in a
river.

Between the fallen trees lies the single track of the military
railroad, and on one side of that is the line of forts and a few feet
beyond them a maze of barbed wire. Beyond the barbed wire again is he
other barrier of fallen trees and the jungle. In its unfinished state
this is not an insurmountable barricade. Gomez crossed it last November
by daylight with six hundred men, and with but the loss of twenty-seven
killed and as many wounded. To-day it would be more difficult, and in a
few months, without the aid of artillery, it will be impossible, except
with the sacrifice of a great loss of life. The forts are of three
kinds. They are best described as the forts, the block houses and the
little forts. A big fort consists of two stories, with a cellar below
and a watch tower above. It is made of stone and adobe, and is painted
a glaring white. One of these is placed at intervals of every half mile
along the trocha, and on a clear day the sentry in the watch tower of
each can see three forts on either side.