FLORIDA AND THE WEST INDIES 241 



acres of uncovered mudflats at the distant waves, 

 offending the nose, but gladdening offal-hunters like 

 the turkey-buzzard. At high-water, Panama has 

 more beauty in its frontage than either of the 

 towns named, though one of them at least is not 

 unlovely in the sunset ; but even so, the muddy 

 water of the southern Bocas is of very different 

 quality from that other shore of the Pacific where 

 I last took leave of it in the opal deeps of Whit- 

 sunday Passage and the verdant channel of Albany 

 Pass. 



Contrast with the Suez Canal will unavoidably 

 suggest itself, first by comparison between Colon, 

 with its strange survivals of the French occupa- 

 tion, its populace of " Spiggoties " and the brisk 

 American invasion within the Zone beyond the 

 American post-office, and that sink of inexpensive 

 iniquity, Port Said, which festers in an atmosphere 

 of coal-dust and trite immorality at the northern 

 end of the older waterway. To those who cross 

 Panama on water the contrast will doubtless 

 present itself still more vividly. Few landscapes 

 could be more widely divergent than the rampant 

 jungle of Panama and the treeless desert of Lower 

 Egypt. Along the hundred miles, or very little 

 less, that separate Port Said from Suez, the sand 

 lies low and level, and such watery interludes as 

 were there before the finest engineers in France 

 let in a sea to meet an ocean were all in their 

 favour. At Panama the Americans have to cut 

 their way through solid rock, and are confronted 

 with a river that alternates between an unnavigable 

 fever-breeding ditch and an ungovernable torrent 

 capable of rising seventy feet from one sunrise to 

 Q 



