We were mounting the river Trinidad.  River, yes, but we followed it only because it had kept back the jungle and left a way free of tree-tops, not because there was not water enough anywhere, in any direction, to float a boat of many times our draught.  Turns so sharp we rocked in our own wake; once we passed acres upon acres of big, cod-like fish floating dead upon the water among the branches and the forest rubbish.  It seems the lake in rising spread over some poisonous mineral in the soil.  But life there was none, except the rampant green dying plant life in every direction to the horizon.  There were not even birds, other than now and then a stray snow-white slender one of the heron species that fled majestically away across the face of the nurtureless waters as we steamed—­no, gasolined down upon it.  Soon after leaving Gatun we had passed a couple of jungle families on their way to market in their cayucas laden with mounds of produce,—­plump mangoes with a maidenly blush on either cheek, fat yellow bananas, grass-green plantains, a duck or a chicken standing tied by one leg on top of it all and gazing complacently around at the scene with the air of an experienced tourist.  It was two hours later that we sighted the next human being.  He was a solitary old native paddling about at the entrance to the “grass-bird region” in a huge dugout as time-scarred as himself.

It was near here that weeks before I had turned with “Admiral” B—­ —­up a little stream now forever gone to a knoll on which sat the thatched shelter of a negro who had “taken to the bush” and refused to move even when notified that he was living on U. S. public domain.  When we had knocked from the trees a box of mangoes and turkey-red maranones, B——­ touched a match to the thatch roof and almost before we could regain the launch the shack was pouring skyward in a column of smoke.  Even the squatter’s old table and chair and a barrel of tumbled odds and ends entirely outside the hut—­it had no walls—­caught fire, and when, we lost sight of the knoll only the blazing stumps of the four poles that had supported the roof remained.

B——­ had burned whole villages in this lake territory, after the owners with legal claims had been paid condemnation damages.  Long ago the natives had been warned to move, and the banks of the lake-to-be specified.  But many of these skeptical children of nature had taken this as a vain “yanqui” boast and either refused to move until burned out or had rebuilt their hovels on land that in a few months more would also be flooded.

The rescue expedition proceeded.  Once we got caught in the top-most branches of a tree, released from which we pushed on along the sinuous river that had no banks.  It was not hot, even at noonday.  We sweated a bit in poling a thirty-foot boat out of a tree-top, but cooled again directly we were off.  My kodak was far away at the other end of the Zone.  But then, on second thought it was better for once