Page:Panama-past-present-Bishop.djvu/226

206 Canal Zone stretches almost unbroken jungle, and there is a Zone policeman standing at the gangway of every steamer.

Roads were an unknown luxury on the Isthmus in 1904, except for the muddy streets of the towns and a few rough trails through the jungle. Now there are many miles of macadamized highway, with concrete drains and bridges, and some day these will be connected to form an automobile speedway from ocean to ocean. One of the first-built and best-known bits of road is the three-mile drive from Panama City out over the beautiful rolling plain of Las Sabanas, to where the red-roofed haciendas, or summer bungalows, of the native aristocracy stand under the palm-trees. Here the rich citizens of Panama City spend the dry season, in primitive shacks, all doors and no windows, that an American dry-goods clerk would turn up his nose at for a week-end camp. But even the poorest of them has plenty of grounds round it and a more or less elaborate gateway, and if you do not go near enough to notice the sickly chickens peeking round the touring-car in the drive, and the fat women in loose wrappers shading themselves on the veranda, the effect is not so bad.

When I was writing this book at my father's house in Ancon, in the dry season of 1912, we used frequently to take a gallop on Las Sabanas in the afternoons. Very varied and interesting were the people we met on the road: pretty American trained-nurses riding astride, and rice-powdered señoritas leaning back in victorias; a farmer from the hills, with rude sandals on his feet and a three-foot machete thrust through his red sash, driving