At six o’clock, when we had reached the Gulf, the sun sank a blood-red disk into great desolate bayous of long grass and dreary stretches of vacant water. Dead trees with hanging gray moss and mistletoe on their bare branches reared themselves out of the swamps like gallows-trees or giant sign-posts pointing the road to nowhere; and the herons, perched by dozens on their limbs or moving heavily across the sky with harsh, melancholy cries, were the only signs of life. On each side of the muddy Mississippi the waste swamp-land stretched as far as the eye could reach, and every blade of the long grass and of the stunted willows and every post of the dikes stood out black against the red sky as vividly as though it were lit by a great conflagration, and the stagnant pools and stretches of water showed one moment like flashing lakes of fire, and the next, as the light left them, turned into mirrors of ink. It was a scene of the most awful and beautiful desolation, and the silence, save for the steady breathing of the steamer’s engine, was the silence of the Nile at night. For the next three days we dropped due south as the map lies from the delta of the Mississippi through the Gulf of Mexico to the Caribbean Sea. It was moonlight by night, and sun and blue water by day, and the decks kept level, and the vessel was clean. Our fellow-passengers were banana-planters and engineers going to Panama and Bluefields, and we asked them many questions concerning rates of exchange and the rainy season and distances and means of transportation, to which they gave answers as opposite as can only come from people who have lived together in the same place for the greater part of their lives. Land, when it came, appeared in the shape of little islands that floated in mid-air above the horizon like the tops of trees, without trunks to support them, or low-lying clouds. They formed the skirmish-line of Yucatan, the northern spur of Central America, and seemed from our decks as innocent as the Jersey sand-hills, but were, the pilot told us, inhabited by wild Indians who massacre people who are so unfortunate as to be shipwrecked there, and who will not pay taxes to Mexico. But the little we saw of their savagery was when we passed within a ship’s length of a ruined temple to the Sun, standing conspicuously on a jutting point of land, with pillars as regular and heavily cut as some of those on the Parthenon. It was interesting to find such a monument a few days out from New Orleans. Islands of palms on one side and blue mountains on the other, and water as green as corroded copper, took the place of the white sand-banks of Yucatan, and on the third day out we had passed the Mexican state and steamed in towards the coast of British Honduras, and its chief seaport and capital, Belize.