On a mango-shaped knoll thirty miles from Gatun that will also soon be lake bottom, we found a native shack transformed into the headquarters of a scientific expedition. We sat down to a frontier lunch which called for none of the excuses made for it by Y—— when he appeared in his dripping full-dress and joined us without even bothering to change his water-spurting shoes. In his boxes he had carefully stuck away side by side an untold number of members of the mosquito family. Queer vocation; but then, any vocation is good that gives an excuse to live out in this wild tropical world.
By one we had Dr. O—— aboard and were waving farewell to the camp. The return, of course, was not the equal of the outward trip; even nature cannot duplicate so perfect a thing. But two raging showers gave us views of the drowning jungle under another aspect, and between them we awakened vast rolling echoes across the silent flooded world by shooting at flocks of little birds with an army rifle that would have killed an elephant.
It is not hard to realize why the bush native does not love the American. Put yourself in his breechclout. Suppose a throng of unsympathetic foreigners suddenly appeared resolved to turn all the world you knew into a lake, just because that absurd outside world wanted to float steamers you never knew the use of, from somewhere you never heard of, to somewhere you did not know. Suppose a representative of that unsympathetic government came snorting down upon you one day in a wild fearful invention they called a motor-boat, as you were lolling under the thatch roof your grandfather built, and cried:
"Come on! Get out of here! We're going to burn your house and turn this country into a lake."
Flood the land which was your great-grand-father's, the spot where you used to play leap-frog under the banana trees, the jungle lane where your mother's courtship days were passed and the ceiga tree under which she was wedded—if matters were ever carried to that ceremonious length. What though this foreign nation gave you a bag of peculiar pieces of metal for your trouble, when you had never seen a score of such coins in your life and barely knew the use of them, being acquainted with life only as it is picked from a mango-tree? The foreigners had cried, "Take this money and go buy a farm somewhere else," and you looked around you and saw all the world you had ever really known the existence of sinking beneath the rising waters. Where would you go, think you, to buy that new farm? Even if you fled and found another unknown land high and dry, or a town, what could you do, having not the remotest idea how to live in a town with only pieces of metal to get food out of instead of the mango-tree that had stood behind the house your grandfather built ever since you were born and dropped mangoes whenever you were hungry? To say the least you would be some peeved.
It was midafternoon when the white bulk of Gatun locks rose on the horizon. Then the lake opened out, the great dam, that is rather a connecting link between two ranges of hills, spread across all the landscape, and at four I raced up the muddy steps behind the station to a telephone. Five minutes later I was hurrying away across locks and dam to the marshland beyond the Spillway to inquire who, and wherefore, had attempted to burn up the I. C. C. launch attached to dredge No. ——.
My Canal Zone days were drawing rapidly to a close. I could have remained longer without regret, but the world is wide and life is short. Soon came the day, June seventeenth, when I must go back across the Isthmus to clear up the last threads of my existence as a "Zoner." Chiefly for old times' sake I dropped off at Empire. But it was not the same Empire of the census. Almost all the old crowd was gone; one by one they had "kissed the Zone good-by." "The boss" of those days had never returned, "smiling Johnny" had been transferred, even Ben had "done quit an' gone back to Bahbaydos." The Zone is like a small section of life; as in other places where generations are short one catches there a hint of what old age will be. It was like wandering over the old campus when those who were freshmen in our day had hawked their gowns and mortarboards and gone their way; I felt like a man in his dotage with only the new, unknown, and indifferent generation about him.
I went down to the old suspension bridge. Far down below was the same struggling energy, the same gangs of upright human ants, the "cut" with its jangle and jar of steam-shovels and trains still stretching away endless in either direction. Here as in the world at large generations of us may come and pass away, but the tearing of the shovels at the rocky earth, the racing of dirt-laden trains for the Pacific goes unbrokenly on, as the world and its work will continue without a pause when we are gone indeed.
Soon the water will be turned in and nine-tenths of all this labor will be submerged and forever hidden from view. The swift growth of the tropics will quickly heal the scars of the steam-shovels, and palm-trees will wave the steamer on its way through what will seem almost a natural channel. Then blase travelers lolling in their deck chairs will gaze about them and snort:
"Huh! Is that all we got for nine years' work and half a billion dollars?" They will have forgotten the scrubbing of Panama and Colon, forgotten the vast hospitals with great surgeons and graduate nurses, the building of hundreds of houses and the furnishing of them down to the last center table, they will not recall the rebuilding of the entire P. R. R., nor scores of little items like $43,000 a year merely for oil and negroes to pump it on the pestilent mosquito, the thousand and one little things so essential to the success of the enterprise yet that leave not a trace behind. Greater perhaps than the building of the canal is the accomplishment of the United States in showing the natives how life can be lived safely and healthily in tropical jungles. Yet the lesson will not be learned, and on the heels of the last canal builder will return all the old slovenliness and disease, and the native will sink back into just what he would have been had we never come.