to enjoy nature as it was without trying to carry it away.  Kodaking is a species of covetousness, anyway, an attempt to bear away home with us and hoard for our own the best we come upon in our travels.  Whereas here, of course, it was impossible.  The greatest of artists could not have carried away a tenth of that scene, a scene so fascinating that though we had tossed into the bottom of the boat at the start a bundle of fresh New York papers—­and fresh New York papers are not often scorned down on the Zone—­they still lay in the bottom of the boat when the trip ended.

At length little thatched cottages began to appear on knolls along the way, and as we chugged our way around the tree-tops upon them the inhabitants slipped quickly into some clothes that were evidently kept for just such emergencies.  Then we began nearing higher land, so that the upper and then the lower branches of the forest stood out of water, then only the ends of the lower limbs dipped in the rising flood, downcast, as if they knew the sentence of death was upon them also.  For though there was sunk already beneath the flood a forest greater than ten Fontainebleaus, the lake was steadily rising a full two inches a day.  Where it touched that morning the 27-foot level, in a few months more, says “the Colonel,” it will reach the 87-foot level and spread over one hundred and sixty-four square miles of territory—­and when “the Colonel” makes an assertion wise men hesitate to put their money on the other horse.  Then will all this vast area with more green than in all the state of Missouri disappear forever beneath the flood and man may dive down, down into the forest and see what the world was like in Noah’s time, and fancy the sunken cities of Holland, for many a famous route, and villages older than the days of Pizarro will be forever wiped out by the rising waters—­a scene to be beheld today nowhere else, and in a few years not even here.  At last we were really in a river, an overflowed river, to be sure, where it would have been hard to find a landing-place or a bank among those tree trunks knee-deep in water.  We had long since crossed the Zone line, but our badges were still valid.  For it has pleased the Republic of Panama, at a whispered word from “Tio Sam,” to cede to the Z. P. command over all Gatun Lake and for three miles around it, as far as ever it may spread.

Then all at once we were startled by a hearty hail from among the trees and I looked up to see Y——­, of the Smithsonian, fully dressed, standing waist-deep in the water at the edge of the forest, waving an insect trap in one hand.

“What the devil are you doing there?” I gasped.

“Doing?  I’m taking a walk along the old Gatun-Chorrera trail, and I fancy I ’ll be about the last man to travel it.  Come on up to camp.”