OCR Text |
Show ff sWf TINT? T I wag: J LOVLR GATUN LOCK (-JZS N EARING COMPIXTION NOT less thaii 20,000 Americans, so the rough and ready estimates esti-mates have it, will go south during the four winter months, beginning with the first of December, De-cember, and extending to the end of March, to visit the Isthmus of Panama and see what they may of the result of the eight years' work which Col. George W. Goethals and his army of 35,000 men have brought almost to completion. The Panama canal is nearly done: only the part of another year remains before this $400,000,000 waterway will join the Atlantic and the Pacific. Next September will mark the completion of the task. And flooding of the canal will mean that' most of the work will be forever hidden hid-den from view. However many go to the isthmus. It is safe to say not more than ten. per cent, of them will come away with more than a vague conception of what has really been accomplished by the engineers. The fault will not have been with the canal. That fairly matches all that has been said about It. The fault will have been with the visitor For, notwithstanding all bis careful guide-book preparations beforehand, before-hand, he will not, after all, see more than the surface aspect of things down In the Canal Zone. In this manner he will resemble the majority of visitors who have already been to Panama; one of every ten of these, perhaps, can boast that he descended to the bottom of the. giant locks, there to grope his way through the concrete culverts or gaze up at the spans, like cathedral arches, of these great steel gates that next year will lock in the waters of the completed canal. One of every twenty, perhaps, can tfll you that he climbed down Into Culebra cut, to spend a day in theeternal bustle of the deep canyon which man has made through the hills, and which so soon will be the channel of great ships as they plow their way from sea to sea. From the Observation Train. The average visitor to the Panama canal sees the Gatun dam from the broad seat of the observation train that is pushed out over that pile of 21,000,000 cubic yards of rock, sand, concrete, and earth once a week. For this seat lie pays a dollar. Never does he get out and look about for himself. The hired lecturer explains everything so well. To see the locks the average visitor may tiptoe gingerly to the concrete edge, and gaze down for half a minute, only to turn fearfully away and spend the rest of his hour watching watch-ing busy cement-mixers that are exactly ex-actly like any other cement-mixers. The tourist's impression of the Panama Pan-ama canal has not been allowed to sink in. A three days' stay on 'the isthmus does not permit of that. The man who has spent seven to nine days at sea from New York, dreaming of the wonders he will find, spends a brief hour at Gatun, half an hour at Mirafiores, another hour at Culebra, and then Is off to his train or to dinner. din-ner. Most of the canal he sees' from the rear platform of his train on the way across.. Deep, wide, and long as Is Culebra cut, the view of it from the train as the engine sweeps around the bend is distinctly disappointing. All about are towering hills which dwarf the cut that winds In and out among them. You get out your glasses, but before you get them adjusted, ad-justed, the train has started, Culebra is hidden from view, and the concrete tops of the Pedro Miguel locks are seen. Yet because they are only the tops of the locks they appear small, and you get another shock of disap: pointment. The fact Is. It is only by getting out "on the job" that one can obtain a comprehensive understanding of what the canal has cost, In energy and time and brains. One must rub elbows with the workmen and talk with them; he must get down into the culverts beneath be-neath the locks and stand by while they lower a forty-ton valve gate Into place; he must get out beneath the dam and Into the cut, out over the foot-bridge that sways 200 feet above the locks, and off around the completed complet-ed parts of the Atlantic and Pacific divisions. Especially one must be willing to spend days at Culebra cut. From the platform up on the side of the cut you cannot adequately feel that here It was that the French and American engineers struggled against appalling odds for . years. You cannot realize that out of this single stretch of the canal 90,000,000 cubic yards of earth have been dug and that another 10,-000,000 10,-000,000 will be taken out before the canal is pronounced complete. But begin your day with a climb down the long flank of an earth "slide" to the bottom of the cut, and then try to scramble out again. If you succeed In either of these ventures, you will have found at least one way of coming com-ing to an appreciation of its stupendous stupend-ous proportion, and what the digging of Culebra cut meant to the men who have almost finished digging it. Down in Culebra cut, where giraffelike giraffe-like drills are boring into the bedrock bed-rock of the isthmus, and long dirt trains are clattering away with what remains of the foundations of Mount Culebra and Gold Hill, one is literally overwhelmed by the magnitude of this, the canal-diggers' greatest accomplishment. ac-complishment. At the bottom of the cut you gaze toward the crest of Gold Hill, towering Into the sky, a thousand thou-sand feet above. Up there, where Balboa is said to have climbed to see both the oceans, the tall palm trees are bending to the breeze, but here the workers are sweltering in the dead heat of the midday sun, far down In the foundations of the earth. At the Bottom of the Cut. If you go down to the Panama canal this winter, go down into Culebra cut. Try there to make yourself heard against the din of the steam hammers and drills; against the incessant 3ull thunder of the dynamite blasts; against the crunch and bite of the steam shovel; against the scream of the locomotives and the crazy clattei of the dirt cars. Dodge about the labyrinth of tracks to escape the ten-mile-an-hour onslaught of the blustering bluster-ing engines, as they make their way toward the sea, hauling their strings of laden cars; get close beneath one of those long-armed steam shovels which swings its tons of rock and dirt In every direction with such seeming recklessness. At last lose yourself among the swarms of human ants who are shoveling away the soft dirt that has come down the long slope of Mount Culebra in one of the "slides" that one so often reads about. After all this, if you are not fairly staggered at the immensity of the accomplishment of our engineers, then you are of stuff less impressionable than the Isthmian rocks. For Culebra cut Is the masterpiece of the $400,000,-000 $400,000,-000 canal job; Its completion will represent rep-resent the ultimate fulfilment of the work. The locks and gates at Gatun, Mirafiores, and Pedro Miguel are wonderful, won-derful, in that they represent the largest of their kind in the world. So also is the Gatun dam, which has made possible the impounding of the dirty Chagres river water in the Gatun lake, and which has made out of an entire countryside an inland sea. But Culebra cut transcends them all. Here is not merely the largest thing of its kind. Here the Continental Divide, the rocky backbone of the Americas, has been carved through, after defying defy-ing all the efforts of the French for twenty years. A mountain has been hewn away. |