“Live about two days if he couldn’t find the trail or the river’s bank,” was the response of the Man Who Knew. “If he lived longer he’d live crazy. Torn by thorns, often poisoned, bitten by venomous insects, blistered by thirst, with the chances against his finding any fruit that was safe eating, he would probably die of the pain and of jungle madness before starvation brought a more merciful death. The jungle is a cat that tortures its captives; a python that embraces them in its graceful folds and hugs them to death; a siren whose beauty lured them to perdition. Look out for it.” The native Indian knows it and avoids it by doing most of his traveling by canoe. On our trip to the river’s mouth we passed many in their slender cayucas, some tied by a vine to the bank patiently fishing, others on their way to or from market with craft well loaded with bananas on the way up, but light coming back, holding gay converse with each other across the dark and sullen stream. Here and there through breaks in the foliage we see a native house, or a cluster of huts, not many however, for the jungle is too thick and the land too low here for the Indians who prefer the bluffs and occasional broad savannas of the upper waters. As we approach its outlet the river, about fifty or sixty yards wide thus far, broadens into a considerable estuary, and rounding a point we see before us the blue Atlantic breaking into white foam on a bar which effectually closes the river to all save the smallest boats, and which you may be sure the United States will never dredge away, to open a ready water-way to the base of the Gatun locks. To the left covering a low point, level as if artificially graded, is a beautiful cocoanut grove, to the right, across a bay perhaps a quarter of a mile wide is a native village of about fifty huts with an iron roofed church in the center--beyond the village rises a steep hill densely covered with verdure, so that it is only by the keenest searching that you can pick out here a stone sentry tower, there the angle of a massive wall--the ruins of the Castle of San Lorenzo. [Illustration: OLD SPANISH MAGAZINE] “Cloud crested San Lorenzo guards The Chagres entrance still, Though o’er each stone the moss hath grown And earth his moat doth fill. His bastions feeble with decay Steadfastly view the sea, And sternly wait the certain fate The ages shall decree.” [Illustration: SPANISH RUINS, PORTO BELLO]