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National Geographic : 1970 Mar
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with wild yams, plantains, and cassava, and served with raw heart-of-palm as a salad tastes absolutely marvelous. Sleep would not come to me that night. My clothes were soaked by the dank jungle. The whine of mosquitoes bespoke their uncount able numbers. And I understood then the tropical torment Panama spelled for the ad venturers and builders of long ago. "Golden Castile" Becomes Panama S-curved Panama confounds visitors with preconceived ideas of geography. Along its coasts you can watch the sun rise in the Pacific, or set in the Caribbean (map, pages 412-13). Its tropical location gives it even tem peratures the year around-kept bearable by cooling trade winds during "summer," the 430 mid-December to mid-April dry season, and by the cloud cover that rolls over jungled hills during the rainy "winter." Those hills are as empty today as when Balboa died, and when the Spaniards moved from the fever-ridden Darien coast to health ier Pacific shores. The governor who had Balboa executed ordered the move. He was Pedro Arias Davila, who came to be known as Pedrarias the Cruel for his ruthless exter mination of the Indians. In 1519 he founded the City of Panama on a shallow, muddy bay. Its name, most authorities hold, stems from an Indian phrase for "abundance of fish." Some believe it the word for tall trees that grew near the village Pedrarias took as his capital's site. Others say it came from panaba - "far away"-the native reply when asked
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