Three Gringos in Venezuela and Central America by Richard Harding Davis

IF Ulysses in his wanderings had attempted to cross the Isthmus of Panama his account of the adventure would not have been filled with engineering reports or health statistics, nor would it have dwelt with horror on the irregularities of the canal company. He would have treated the isthmus in language full of imagination, and would have delivered his tale in the form of an allegory. He would have told how on such a voyage his ship came upon a strip of land joining two great continents and separating two great oceans; how he had found this isthmus guarded by a wicked dragon that exhaled poison with every breath, and that lay in wait, buried in its swamps and jungles, for sailors and travellers, who withered away and died as soon as they put foot upon the shore. But that he, warned in time by the sight of thousands of men's bones whitening on the beach, hoisted all sail and stood out to sea.

It is quite as easy to believe a story like that as to believe the truth: that for the last century a narrow strip of swamp-land has blocked the progress of the world; that it has joined the peoples of two continents without permitting them to use it as a thoroughfare; that it has stopped the meeting of two great oceans and the shipping of the world, and that it has killed with its fever half of those who came to do battle against it. There is something almost uncanny in the manner in which this strip of mud and water has resisted the advance of man, as though there really were some evil genius of the place lurking in the morasses and brooding over the waters, throwing out its poison like a serpent, noiselessly and suddenly, meeting the last arrival at the very moment of his setting foot upon the wharf, arrogant in health and hope and ambition, and leaving him with clinched teeth and raving with madness before the sun sets.