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Last night we reached the range of hills which form, as it were, the northern coast-line of the vast series of savannas which stretch from the tropics to the Straits of Magellan; and it is now a question whether we shall descend to the llanos or continue our search in the sierra. "It was there I left him," said Carmen, pointing to a quebrada some ten miles away. "Where we were yesterday?"
The icebergs of the Arctic, the bananas of the tropics, the camels of the East, the buffaloes of the West, and the cannibals of the South, are equally at our service. We can hold the mountains, rivers, seas, and human races between our finger and thumb, and thus, as we gently dally with care, we may see the wonders of the world as in a pleasant dream.
In every part of the tropics there are tree snakes that twist among boughs and shrubs, or lie coiled up in the dense masses of foliage. These are of many distinct groups, and comprise both venomous and harmless genera; but almost all of them are of a beautiful green colour, sometimes more or less adorned with white or dusky bands and spots.
I want to be manager of something way up like a railroad or a diamond trust or an automobile factory. Now here comes this little man from the tropics with just what I want, and he's offered me the job. "'What job? I asks. 'Is he going to revive the Georgia Minstrels or open a cigar store? "'He's no 'coon, says Denver.
A good fisherman supplies us with bread and with herbs, we have clean, dry straw for our couches; what could man wish for more?" "But you must feel the cold at night, coming straight from the tropics," remarked the captain. "Perhaps our bodies are cold sometimes. We have not noticed it.
I wish you to take up all the country stretching away from the north pole on all sides for many degrees south, and buy Greenland and Iceland at the best figure you can get now while they are cheap. It is my intention to move one of the tropics up there and transfer the frigid zone to the equator.
He opens a door, while we speak, and you would not be in the least surprised, in the exalted condition to which the wonderful spectacle has brought you, to hear him say, "In this room we keep the Equator." In fact, as the door opens, and the gush of hot air breathes out upon your excited brain, it seems to you as if it undoubtedly were the back-door to the Tropics.
Does not this fact, as well as the broader fact that different varieties of the Plantain and Banana girdle the earth round at the Tropics, and have girdled it as long as records go back, hint at a time when there was a tropic continent or archipelago round the whole equator, and at a civilisation and a horticulture to which those of old Egypt are upstarts of yesterday?
His purpose was to have carried this merchandize in carts from Panama, about four leagues, or sixteen miles overland, to the river Chagre, which is said to be navigable, and which discharges itself into the North Sea not far from Nombre de Dios, where the goods could be reshipped for Spain; by which means all kind of goods might be brought from India in a shorter time, and with less danger, than by sailing round the Cape of Good Hope, as the voyage from the Moluccas to Panama is almost a perfectly straight course between the line and the tropics.
Formerly canals intersected the streets in all directions, rendering the city the most pestilential place within the tropics; but by the orders of Sir Stamford Raffles, while the English had possession of the island, they were all filled up, except the Grand Canal and its tributaries.
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