an area of about thirty-three thousand, five hundred square miles, which is very nearly the size of the State of Maine. At the place where the canal is being built, the Isthmus is about forty miles wide, but though the actual distance from ocean to ocean is less in other places, the only break in the central range of mountains, the Cordilleras del Bando, that runs from one end of the country to the other, occurs at this point. At the narrowest part of the Isthmus, near the South American end, the hills are from one to two thousand feet high, while near the Central American end there are not a few peaks of from six to seven thousand feet. At the summit of the old pass at Culebra, before the engineers began to cut it down, the continental divide was only two hundred and ninety feet above sea-level.
On either side of the Cordilleras, broad stretches of jungle or open prairie slope down to the sea, the former predominating on the Atlantic side, the latter on the Pacific. Numerous streams flow into the two oceans. The largest of these is the Tuyra, which, with its tributary, the Chucunaque, empties into the Gulf of San Miguel, near the spot where Balboa waded into the Pacific (see page 61). The second largest and the best known of the rivers of Panama is the famous Chagres, whose mouth is only six miles from the Atlantic entrance of the canal. Like the Tuyra and the Chepo on the Pacific side, the Chagres is navigable for large canoes and small launches for many miles, particularly in the rainy season. River communication is very important in a heavily wooded country where roads are scarce and bad, as they were in the United States before
