A WOMAN IN THE WILDERNESS.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 11609, 29 January 1916, Page 5

A WOMAN IN THE WILDERNESS.

EXPERIENCES OF MISS WINIFRED JAMES. Lif © on the lagoons and in tic jungle of Panama is not, for a woman, a very joyous experience. Miss "Winifred James, the novelist, Has spent there the years since Iter marriage, and is not exactly cnthusiastio about Central America as a fixed place of residence. She has just returned to London for bix months change and is relating lier experiences in a hook which published in a few weeks, entitled A Woman in the Wilderness" She has been living in Almirante, near Bocas del Toro, a hundred and forty miles away from the entrance to the canal zone and from Panama proper. Even the sun, which blazes all day long over the clearances and -the jungle, has its drawbacks. ~ "One longs and longs and longs, she said in an "interview, "for a good old black fog, or even to see the trees dying; and the trees do not die It is just one eternal blaze. It is like a lovely woman whom you begin to hate because she never has any change in her expression. It is all very beautiful, but you long for something different. "It is true that man is making a difference; but it is the usual defacing of nature that takes plac© with the breaking of the sod and the beginning of a new town. That town, might be as near the water's edge as possible the site chosen was necessarily a part of the mangrove swamp. To fill the swamp and make a foothold the hills must be torn away. _ Then came the inevitable corrugated! iron and weatherboard. And now we are a town and a terminus, and the banana-laden trains come down through their fifty miles or farms and crowd the railway yard, waiting to discharge their loads into the great ships that lie, waiting to be fed, alongside the imposing concrete wharf. " When I went there first there was no ground at all to walk on. There was a board walk about a yard wide running before all the shacks and houses, which were built on piles in the swamp. Filling in the to make the town is a slow and hideous process. "At night people go about carrying lanterns, and often tne effect was very odd, Tor it was as though they were crossing a field of snow. < There is a new coral ' fill' on our side of the creek, and, when the moon was strong

enough, the light that was thrown upon the whit© mass tnade it look just like a snow field. Now, however, the ooral is bringing up its little ferns again, and they are inaking a green haze over it all NINTH NIGHT. Miss James spoke of a jumble sale which she organised for the British Red Cross, ana was attended by hundreds of negroes and negro women. "They all brought their pennies," she said, "and didn't they spend them? I was weighed down with the money at last, and when I counted it all up there was £IOO for me, all in Panamanian silver. They are wanting me to get up another sale. It was a great outing for them, for was there ever a greater Britisher than the Jamaica negro? And they had never had anything like it before, the usual amusements being church, prize-fight-ing and Ninth Nights. "Ninth Night." Miss James explained, "is so called because it is on the ninth night, according to Jamaicans, that the spirit tries again to enter the house. Therefore, when anyone dies the friends and relatives assemble on this to drive the spirit away. They sing and sing and sing and sing, and drink between whiles. " I went to one Ninth Night which was held in a back yard in Jamaica, and remember that when the professional hymn-leader went out of tiie room to spend a shilling that my con> panion had given him he left in charge a negro boy of twelve. That was the chance the boy had been waiting for. He got two lines of hymn. ' Like brutes they live, like brutes they die,' and hurled them at them, looking at everyone separately, and sending them to perdition with his rolling eyes. He tneiv he would have to give it all up when the man came back, and he meant to make the best use of his time. WOMAN'S DAY IN THE JUNGLE. "It is all very amusing, both there and 'in Panama, until you come to live your own life, and then it is not amusing at all. In the jungle of Panama there is no place to < walk; there is nothing to go and see; there is no old civilisation, except in Panama City| there is nothing near lis 3 you cannot even get to the hills. " "Wiat do I do all day? I will tell you. The days are all the same. We get up at hair-past six. At half-past seven we have coffee. All the morning one sees about domestic affairs and spurs on the servants. "At twleve we have lunch. Then there are things to see to, and one rests and reads till half-past three* Then we have tea; then we sew; then, at five perhaps, we go out for a little bit of a walk along the railway line. At seven we have dinner. Sometimes someone comes in, and sometimes there is no one; often at half-past eight we go to bed. That is repeated for three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, and if you stay another year you can double it. For a man engaged in trade there is a busy life to be lived, but the woman sits on a watch-tower and waits." .