Above Cruces the banks of the Chagres begin to rise in perpendicular limestone cliffs, perhaps 60 or 70 feet high while from their crests the giant tropic trees, the wild fig, the Panama, the Ceiba and the sentinel rise yet another one hundred feet into the bright blue sky. Amongst them flash back and forth bright colored parrots and paroquets, kingfishers like those of our northern states, only gaudier, and swallows innumerable. Up and down the river fly heavy cormorants disturbed by the clank of the poles among the stones of the river bottom, but not too shy to come within 50 feet or so of our boat where, much to my satisfaction, there is no gun. White and blue herons stand statuesque in the shallows with now and then an aigret. Of life other than feathered one sees but little here. A few fish leaped, but though the river was crystalline and my guide assured me it was full of fish I saw none lurking in either deeps or shallows. Yet he must have been right for the natives make much of fish as an article of diet, catching them chiefly by night lines or the unsportsmanlike practice of dynamiting the stream, which has been prohibited by the Panama authorities, although the prohibition is but little enforced. Now and then an alligator slips lazily from the shore into the stream but they are not as plentiful here as in the tidal waters of the lower river. Occasionally, too, a shrill cry from one of our boatmen, taken up by the other two at once, turns attention to the underbrush on the bank, where the ungainly form of an iguana is seen scuttling for safety. Ugliest of beasts is the iguana, a greenish, bulbous, pop-eyed crocodile, he serves as the best possible model for a dragon to be slain by some St. George. The Gila monster of Arizona is a veritable Venus of reptiles in comparison to him, and the devil fish could give him no lessons in repulsiveness. Yet the Panamanian loves him dearly as a dish. Let one scurry across the road, or, dropping from a bough, walk on the surface of a river--as they literally do--and every dark-skinned native in sight will set up such a shout as we may fancy rose from oldtime revellers when the boar’s head was brought in for the Yuletide feast. Not more does the Mississippi darkey love his possum an’ sweet ’taters, the Chinaman his bird’s nest soup and watermelon seeds, the Frenchman his absinthe or the German his beer than does the Panamanian his iguana. [Illustration: CRUCES--A LITTLE TOWN WITH A LONG HISTORY]