Till at length the sea opened on our sight through the alley-way of jungle, and a broad inviting cocoanut grove nodded and beckoned on our left. Instead we paddled out across the sandbar to play with the surf of the Atlantic, but found it safer to return and glide across the little bay to the drowsy straw and tin village. Here--for the mouth of the Chagres like its source lies in a foreign land--a solitary Panamanian policeman in the familiar Arctic uniform enticed us toward the little thatched office, and house, and swinging hammock of the alcalde to register our names, and our business had we had any. So deep-rooted was the serenity of the place that even when "Dusty," in all Zone innocence, addressed the white-haired little mulatto as "hombre" he lost neither his dignity nor his temper. The policeman and a brown boy of merry breed went with us up the grassy rise to the old fort. In its musty vaulted dungeons were still the massive, rust-corroded irons for feet, waist and neck of prisoners of the old brutal days; blind owls stared upon us; once the boy brought down with his honda, or slung-shot, one of the bats that circled uncannily above our heads. In dank corners were mounds of worthless powder; the bakery that once fed the miserable dungeon dwellers had crumbled in upon itself. Outside great trees straddled and split the massive stone walls that once commanded the entrance to the Chagres, jungle waved in undisputed possession in its earth-filled moat, even the old cannon and heaped up cannon-balls lay rust-eaten and dejected, like decrepit old men who have long since given up the struggle. We came out on the nose of the fort bluff and had before and below us and underfoot all the old famous scene, for centuries the beginning of all trans-Isthmian travel,--the scalloped surf-washed shore with its dwindling palm groves curving away into the west, the Chagres pushing off into the jungled land. We descended to the beach of the outer bay and swam in the salt sea, and the policeman, scorning the launch party, squatted a long hour in the shade of a tree above in tropical patience. Then with "sour" oranges for thirst and nothing for hunger--for Lorenzo has no restaurant--we turned to paddle our way homeward up the Chagres, that bears the salt taste of the sea clear to the Spillway. Whence one verse only of a stanza by the late bard of the Isthmus struck a false note on our ears; Then go away if you have to, Then go away if you will! To again return you will always yearn While the lamp is burning still. You've drunk the Chagres water And the mango eaten free, And, strange though it seems, It will haunt your dreams This Land of the Cocoanut Tree.