But Sonnyboy remained unrecon- 
ciled to the bleak vista. It was not at 
all his imagination had pictured it. 
The Everglades—place of rich, orchid- 
hung enchantment! Here was only a 
barren stretch of flat country, broken 
intermittantly by up-reared tufts of 
brown and sere trees. The receding 
waters had left all living things, bred 
of them, to die and disintegrate. The 
eye wearied of the utter, desolate 
sameness of it—and the sun was in- 
tolerant of humans! 
“Wait,” I said to him, “be patient. 
There is another side to the Ever- 
glades—some of the real is left.” 
For sixteen miles we guided our com- 
plaining Ford out the ribbon of 
dazzling linjestone. Some day, it will 
be a marvelous Coast-to-Coast boule- 
vard. What the dredges eat out of 
the canal make wonderful road-bed! 
And that is why the road follows the 
Tamiami, side by side. 
We finally entered upon a more 
picturesque portion of the strange 
route, where hammocks had been cut 
in twain by the relentless dipper- 
dredges, and where their verdure still 
clung to its moistened charm. There 
were more trailing masses of vine and 
more clusters of rich green. The saw 
grass stood up a trifle more bravely, 
and aquatic fowl began to fleck the 
landscape with white and brown and 
the metallic lustre of wild ducks. 
Once a mighty cloud of white flakes 
went shimmering up from a little fairy 
island of myrtles, and melted into the 
hazy sky—herons, disturbed by the 
snarl of our car. 
At this early hour we saw no one. 
There were no boats on the canal and 
no habitations this far out, in the 
soggy muck of the ’Glades. An occa- 
sional dynamite shed, or the remains 
of a surveying party’s camp, alone 
gave the touch of any civilization. 
Hammocks there were in plenty— 
some near, some far, some mere knobs 
of purple against the distant sky, 
miles and miles to Eastward and 
Westward. One was not even con- 
scious of the ocean to the Eastward, 
yet its cool, tangy breath occasionally 
refreshed our nostrils. 
We were as utterly alone as if we 
had been suddenly cast down into some 
forgotten realm. 
Mile upon mile we hummed along— 
the canal at our right, unvarying, save 
when, as I have said, a hammock had 
been hewn at its heart, to make way 
for the trail which coursed steadily, 
monotonously to the glory of the West. 
“And we’re going to stay out here 
all night!” Sonnyboy said, half to 
himself, and rather apprehensively, I 
thought. 
“Tt will be the greatest experience 
of your life,” I retorted. 
And he did not mention it again. 
Now the roadbed was less finished 
and its surface bore lumpy marks of 
recently upthrown masses of lime- 
stone. The car traveled at _ snail’s 
pace. Ahead loomed the shadowy out- 
lines of timber, a dredge, skeleton- 
like and inky black against the pale 
sky. The sides of the canal were ir- 
regular. Hammocks were festoons of 
living plant life and unmarred trees. 
Bright blossoms, some as red as blood, 
peeped from batteries of myrtle and 
bay. 
The saw grass, on both sides, stood 
arrogantly upright, baring their ser- 
rated blades to the sun. Now and 
again, at a low place along the West- 
ern shore of the canal, the waters 
reached out hungrily again, and into 
secret nooks of button-like islands. 
Minnows, in schools, played in these 
shallows, as if undecided as_ to 
whether they would seek the deep, 
calm flow of the canal; or the doubtful 
sloughs that grew ever shallower, on 
the waving floor of the ’Glades. A 
crane eyed us from the grotto of green 
along a nearby hammock. 

THE VERY OBEDIENT TAMIAMI 
“CARAVAN” 
CANAL. 
GOOD—BUT FURTHER ALONG IT MEANT 
MOUNTAIN CLIMBING 
TRAIL 
STOPPING ALONGSIDE THE 
THE ROAD HERE IS RATHER 
“What will happen when it ALL 
dries up?” was Sonnyboy’s next anx- 
ious query. 
There had been long periods of 
silence and of retrospection. 
“Cultivation, homesteaders, towns, 
cities,” I said, “it’s sure to come. 
Some of the larger hammocks—and 
they are often ten miles in length— 
boast the richest kind of farming soil. 
The ’Glade floor, proper, is a few feet 
deep in black muck—and beneath that 
—sand, marl, limestone—layers of tiny 
crustaceans — the gathering of centu- 
ries, under water. Once exposed to the 
sun and the air, all that is precious 
fades into hopeless dust. But this is 
the Highway of Future Progress. 
Mystery and romance are destined to 
disappear.” 
Eighteen miles at the very least— 
and Sonnyboy begins to sit up and 
take notice. The mystery of the 
’Glades has suddenly possessed him, 
as, sooner or later, it envelopes the 
consciousness of all who venture into 
this strange place. There is no pos- 
sible way to describe it—to put what it 
is into mere words. It is something 
one feels. It is not the incandescent 
spray of peculiar sunshine over miles 
of flat muck-land, it is not the 
astounding hammocks of every size, 
above which wild fowl are ever circling, 
it is not the serenity and the peace 
and the absence of civilized material- 
ism, it is not animal nor feathered 
life. Yet this sense of mystery and 
the indefinable has always persisted. 
The car could barely creep along, 
and I expected the tires to give way 
before the sharp impacts of the marl 
path — which was no longer a road. 
Our camping equipment, on the back 
seat, rattled and clattered. Often we 
were compelled to drive into crevices, 
and over great irregular masses of 
jagged limestone. And always there 
was an increasing animation in the 
air, in the waters of the canal, and 
on the dangerous white route ahead. 
Impudent vultures, hopping over the 
marl in a ravenous attack upon the 
remnants of garfish, thrown there by 
disgusted dredge-gang fishermen, al- 
lowed us to come within scraping 
distance of their ungainly bodies, be- 
fore they took sullen flight, to settle 
back again in our wake. Every 
murky, mucky slough held parades of 
limpkin. The herons and gulls were 
as much in evidence as in a sanctuary. 
The miles which followed were com- 
paratively few, but they seemed in- 
terminable because of the rough going. 
And when the very last square foot of 
half-way navigable limestone road-bed 
had been traversed, we met “Black 
Bass Joe.” 
He was seated on a flat-bottomed 
scow—a tender for the big dredge, — 
smoking his pipe and—fishing. There 
was no one else around. The camp 
was desolate. 
“Everybody in town for two days,” 
he saluted, “I’m jest tendin’ things. 
Not many folks has the gumption t’ 
come this far out, but them little fel- 
lers’—pointing to the Ford—“ain’t 
frightened by poor goin’. Why say— 
there’s a surveyor-chap I know, who 
has one, and he drives right out fer 
miles over th’ western part—into 
muck, across saw grass, down through 
sloughs that isn’t dry yet and hub- 
deep, almost, in sand—an’ that car of 
his’n seems t’ like it better’n a maca- 
dam bully-vard. I’ve known him t’ 
leave it at th’ edge of a hammock fer 
a week at a time—day an’ night and 
it a rainin’ cloudbursts —and he just 
Pase 36 
