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The main body of the Bay is of the deep blue our eyes have already become accustomed to, but the shore-line is a wonderful combination of jade and emerald, that dances and scintillates as the breeze plays with the surface of the waters.
"Yes," assents Seagriff, "thet air the best way. 'Sides, thar's no chance o' our gettin' past 'em out o' reach o' thar sling-stones. But I guess we hevn't much to fear from thet lot, ef thar aren't others to jine 'em; an' I don't see any others." "Nor do I," indorses the Captain, sweeping the shore-line with his glass. "It's the only craft I can see anywhere."
Inasmuch as, north of this angle, this boundary line follows the 120th meridian, which traverses the Lake longitudinally from two to four miles from its eastern shore-line, it follows that more than two-thirds of its area falls within the jurisdiction of California, the remaining third being within the boundary of Nevada.
Looking back, they could see the valley marked off by its roads into many squares of green, and dotted here and there by small towns and cities stretching away toward the western ocean until it was lost in a gray-blue haze out of which the distant San Gabriels, beyond Cajon Pass, lifted into the clear sky above, like the shore-line of dreamland rising out of a dream sea.
Thus over Gatun Lake they flew, over the Chagres River; along the course of Culebra Cut, with its high banks, across the Pedro Miguel and Miraflores locks on the other side of the isthmus; over Ancon; and finally below them lay clustered the white-robed buildings of Panama itself, with the swelling blue reaches of the big Pacific to the southward and westward, and the bold shore-line of South America to the southeastward.
In all, they remained in the dory perhaps ten or twelve hours, and in that time they perhaps skirted more than one hundred miles of shore-line, counting the indentations of the bays, although in direct distance they did not reach a total of more than fifty or sixty miles.
They are wooded to the summits, and long ages ago their rugged cliffs formed, doubtless, a fitting shore-line to that great lake whose fresh-water billows were nursed in a space twice larger than even Superior itself can boast of; but, as has been stated in an earlier chapter, that inland ocean has long since shrunken into the narrower limits of Winnipeg, Winnipegoosis, and Manitoba-the Great Sea, the Little Sea, and the Straits of the God.
At last we were ready. Some of the horses were sent by boat the day before, for this strange lake has little or no shore-line. Granite mountains slope stark and sheer to the water's edge, and drop from there to frightful depths below. There are, at the upper end, no roads, no trails or paths that border it.
The mellow ploughed earth on the right hand stretched down to the shore-line, and a plough-boy walked up and down the long, straight furrows whistling 'My Nannie's awa'. Pettybaw is so far removed from the music-halls that their cheap songs and strident echoes never reach its sylvan shades, and the herd-laddies and plough-boys still sweeten their labours with the old classic melodies.
It was several minutes before I even ventured to creep up the sand-spit into the denser blackness of the over-hanging bank, but, once there safely, I discovered the drift had landed me at the mouth of a narrow gully, apparently a mere crevice in the rocky shore-line. It was the occasional downpour of water after rain which had caused the accumulation of debris on which my log had grounded.
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