CHAPTER XII.
LOST IN THE JUNGLE AT NIGHT.
“Just look at it!”
The lieutenant, after many warnings against getting in the way, and against getting lost in the jungle, had just left Peter and Jimmie, and the boys stood at the verge of the great Culebra cut, taking in the wonder and the force of the marvelous scene.
Night and day, under the great white lights, the work went forward, cutting a way for the commerce of the world. Night and day the human ants bored into the earth. Continuously the blasting and scraping, the puffing and the roaring, went on. Always the great steam shovels were biting into the soil and the rock.
“That doesn’t look like the deep blue sea down there, does it?” Peter went on, “yet the largest vessels in the world will be sailing over here in four years, sailing through this cut, and over a forest beyond the rise there. It looks big, doesn’t it? And it sounds big, too.”
From where the boys stood there seemed to be a hopeless confusion of men and machines, but they knew that back of all the hurry, and bustle, and noise, was a great machine, a wonderful system, born in a human brain and reaching its lines out to the smallest detail.
“When you sit on a fire-escape balcony, or in a park,” Jimmie said, his mind going back to the New York lounging places he knew best, “and read about how many tons of earth have been removed during the week, you don’t sense it, do you? You’ve got to come down here and catch Uncle Sam at his job.”