Still, when I caught my first glimpse of the
distant Pacific, I felt that, even through a miserable drizzle, it was a
noble prospect.
As you proceed, you occasionally pass through small open savannahs,
which become larger, and the clear spaces wider, until the forest you
have been travelling under gradually breaks into beautiful clumps of
trees, like those in a gentleman's park, and every here and there a
placid clear piece of water spreads out, full of pond turtle, which I
believe to be one and the same with the tortoise, and eels; the latter
of which, by the by, are very sociable creatures, for in the clear
moonlight nights, with the bright sparkling dew on the short moist
grass, they frequently travel from one pond to another, wriggling along
the grass like snakes. I have myself found them fifty yards from the
water; but whether the errand was love or war, or merely to drink tea
with some of the slippery young females in the next pool, and then
return again, the deponent sayeth not.
As you approach the town, the open spaces before--mentioned become more
frequent, until at length you gain a rising ground, about three miles
from Panama, where, as the sun again shone out, the view became truly
enchanting.
There lay the town of Panama, built on a small tongue of land, jutting
into the Pacific, surrounded by walls, which might have been a
formidable defence once, but I wish my promotion depended on my rattling
the old bricks and stones about their ears, with one single frigate, if
I could only get near enough; but in the impossibility of this lies the
strength of the place, as the water shoals so gradually, that the tide
retires nearly a mile and a half from the walls, rising, I consider,
near eighteen feet at the springs, while, on the opposite side of the
Isthmus, at Chagres for instance, there is scarcely any at all, the gulf
stream neutralizing it almost entirely.
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