The original city stood on a peninsula, and three sides of this were bounded by the sea wall, rising from about high water mark to a height of from twenty to thirty feet. About half way between the present plazas of the Cathedral and Santa Ana the wall turned inward with a great frowning bastion at each corner and crossed the Isthmus. A moat was dug on its landward side, shutting off all communication with the mainland save over the drawbridge and through the sally-port on the line of the Avenida Centrale. With drawbridge up and sally-port closed the old town was effectually shut off from attack by land, while its guns on the landward wall effectually commanded the broad plain on which now stands the upper part of the town, and the declivities of Ancon Hill where now are the buildings of the Zone hospital and the Tivoli Hotel. [Illustration: VAULTS IN THE PANAMA CEMETERY The small sepulchres are rented for a specified time, usually three years. Unless the lease is then renewed the bones of the tenant are cast out into a common pile.] A good bit of construction and of military engineering was the wall of Panama--our own engineers on the Canal have done no better. Round the corner from La Mercedes Church a salient bastion crops out among fragile frame tenements and jerry-built structures. The angle is as sharp as though the storms of two and a half centuries had not broken over it. Climb it and you will find the top level, grassy, and broad enough for a tennis court full thirty feet above the level of the town. The construction was not unlike that of the center walls of the locks designed by the best American engineers. Two parallel walls of masonry were built, about forty to fifty feet apart and the space between filled in with dirt, packed solidly. On this part of the wall were no bomb proofs, chambers or dungeons. The guns were mounted _en barbette_, on the very top of the wall and discharged through embrasures in the parapet. Rather let it be said that they were to have been fired, for the new Panama was built after the plague of the pirates had passed and the bane of the buccaneers was abated. No foe ever assaulted the city from its landward side. In the frequent revolutions the contending parties were already within the town and did their fighting in its streets, the old walls serving no more useful purpose than the ropes which define a prize ring. Only the sea-wall has heard the thunder of cannon in deadly conflict. There during the brief revolution which gave the United States the whip hand in Panama a Colombian gunboat did indeed make a pretense of shelling the city, but was driven away by machine guns mounted on the wall. [Illustration: RUINS OF SAN DOMINGO CHURCH]