“That was over there where the hills rise up like men watching the lights and listening to the noise?” asked Jimmie, his imagination thoroughly stirred by the scene.
“Yes, over there. It would have taken the Frenchmen a century to dig down to the level where those shovels are working, where those tracks lie. I’m afraid it took the men they brought here most of the time to bury the dead. But, after all, they never got in touch with the really big thing.”
“I guess that was the Chagres river,” Peter said; “I’ve read something about that, about the trouble it makes.”
“Yes, that was the river,” the stranger went on, by this time pretty deep in the confidence and admiration of the boys. “They found the Chagres having everything its own way on the uplands, over to the north, there. It ambled along like a perfect lady in spots, then it twisted its water into whirling ropes which pulled at the banks and toppled cliffs into the current.”
“Freshets?” asked Jimmie.
“Exactly. When the engineers came they found something worth while. They found a dismal, soggy-looking ditch which could do things in a single night. They found crumbling and shaling cliffs which showed the bite of the waters. Time and again they had to do their work all over again. Then they decided to take the Chagres by the neck and choke it into subjection.”
“I’d like to see some one choke a river,” Jimmie laughed. “You try to choke a river and you’ll find that the harder you clutch it the more trouble it will make you.”
“But they not only choked the Chagres,” the stranger said, with a captivating smile which went far toward giving him the complete confidence of the boys, “they put it in chains. If you look on a detail map of the Isthmus, you will see a white band stretching from Limon Bay to La Boca, just below the hill of Ancon. That is the line of the canal. Then, across this white band, you will see a crooked line, a turning and twisting line. That is the river, which seems to change its mind about general direction every few minutes. The engineers found this river in the habit of getting up in the night and tearing their work in pieces.”
“Why didn’t they cut a straight channel for it?” asked Jimmie.
“That was tried, but finally the engineers decided to stop trying to make the river behave itself, as a river, and turned their attention to squelching it. They are going to turn it into a lake—the Lake of Gatun.”