Was it love of adventure merely? ambition to do something
whereof to brag about to admiring aunts or country cousins? Hardly. The
beauty of the wonderful panorama which spreads before the group of
strangers is too much neglected, their instruments are too carefully
adjusted and noted, and their consultations are far too earnest and
protracted, to admit of either supposition. The old man of the _vigia_,
as I have said, was a wondering spectator. He wondered why the eyes of
the strangers, glasses as well as eyes, and theodolites as well as
glasses, should all be directed across the bay, across the level
grounds beyond it, far away to the blue line of the Cordilleras,
cutting the clear sky with their serrated outline. He does not observe
that deep notch in the great backbone of the continent, as regular as
the cleft which the pioneer makes in felling a forest-tree; nor does he
observe that the breeze which ripples the waters at the foot of the
volcano is the north wind sweeping all the way from the Bay of Honduras
through that break in the mountain range, which everywhere else, as far
as the eye can reach, presents a high, unbroken barrier to its passage
to the Pacific.
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