The journey of two hours was a delightful transformation from our long siege of Caribbean discomfort. The cars had no glass in the windows, and the breeze caused by our motion kept us comfortably cool without bringing in any dust. The inhabitants we saw along the road were as black and curious looking as imps, and the foliage so dense in places as to appear almost solid; and the frequent views of portions of the incomplete canal and of the picturesque rivers that intersected and mirrored the tangled foliage, lent a fascinating wildness and weirdness to the landscape, that reminded us of oriental tales and occult apparitions.
But all is not gold that glitters, nor passion that paints, nor poetry that poses. Commerce and greed, poverty and death, profit and loss, had left their trails. In places we saw ruined machinery sticking out of the underbrush. Indeed, whole workshops were covered and all but concealed by the rank growth of vegetation. At Bas Matachin a machine shop with an equipment worth at least a quarter of a million of dollars and covering six acres was overgrown; and near it several acres of car wheels and steel rails had already been dug out. After being put in order the shop was going to develop a capacity for turning out fifteen locomotives and 115 cars per month. Other warehouses contained a million dollars’ worth of pumps, dredges and machine tools. Hundreds of superfluous letter presses and six tons of rusty steel pens were found among them. At Culebra they were repairing 1,000 cars, thirty locomotives and seven excavators, besides many antiquated steam shovels, all of which were to be utilized to keep men busy until more modern machinery could be imported. Costly chicken-coops, a horse bath-tub 15x75 feet in area, and a pig pen 100x200 feet (the latter made of concrete with iron supports and a galvanized roof, and capable of holding 200 hogs) were discovered in the jungle. Surely Panama until just recently contained the greatest amount of accessible buried treasures of any country in the world. In the basement of the administration building at Panama are French printing presses and lithographic presses, and a carload of drawing sheets, which is, according to the investigation of Frank C. Carpenter, from whose writings the above astonishing items of information are taken, thousands of dollars’ worth more than can be used in all of the work of the canal.
During the last half hour of the journey across the isthmus the scenery was hilly, and the view less impeded by crowding vegetation. The barracks of the U. S. marines at Empire, nestling in the foliage on the side of the mountain, made a romantic picture as seen from the train, something like Rhine scenery without the Rhine. And I think that the luxuriance of the tropical foliage in the valley made an acceptable substitute for the Rhine at that point. Better to have Rhine scenery without the Rhine than the Rhine without any scenery, since we can’t have everything in Panama. It is easier to imagine a river than to imagine the scenery. But when the canal is finished we will also have to imagine the scenery, for the present railroad and many of the villages we were looking at will be at the bottom of a lake, and ships will be passing over them.
ABANDONED MACHINERY OF THE FRENCH
We rode through the Culebra cut, where they are cutting through a mountain ridge 300 feet high. Three hundred feet high seems pretty low for a mountain ridge until one attempts to dig through it and carry the rocky debris twenty-three miles up the Atlantic coast whence it can not be borne back by the torrents of the rainy season. Its accomplishment would make a fit subject for an Arabian Night story. But Uncle Sam finds it easy. He is going to build the canal over the mountain, and make his cement out of the debris.
Suddenly, long before I expected or even desired it, we stopped at the city of Panama, the Mecca of my pilgrimage. I bade farewell to the S. S. Limonians, who were taken by the train to the mouth of the canal where the pier was located and where the Pacific Mail steamer was waiting for them, and started for Hotel Centrál. One of the most agreeable features about steamship friends is that there is no pain at parting. We enjoy them, and leave them rejoicing, and readily find substitutes wherever we go. If we meet them again soon, we greet them as vociferously as if they were old cronies; if we never meet them again we forget them as if they had been changes in the weather.
I found cabmen in abundance, all native negroes. They were unlike any other cabmen I had ever met. In a way they were saints, gentlemen and business men, and didn’t “let on.” Instead of taking advantage of the facts that the weather at Panama was always either hot or rainy, the distance too great to be walked, and that there were no street cars, to charge a dollar for the long ride to the hotel at the other end of the town, they charged ten cents. Pah! In Chicago the cabfare from the railway stations to my house is two dollars and a half. But by keeping their price down to ten cents the Panama cabmen not only have killed street car competition, but they get more jobs without doing any more work. Their horses do the work while they merely take rides, and are kept cool by the motion and entertained by their customers. It is a wonder that with such successful and moral business models so near them, the Colón negroes can be so mercenary and shortsighted.
I like a cheap ride, but when it is as cheap as that it seems like something not worth having. One can take two and a half rides for their price of a glass of beer. It is preposterous. While in Panama I did refuse to ride once, and walked to the station from the hotel—but only once. The ride was worth the price of two and a half schooners of beer. The distance was composed of cobblestones and animated by heat, and grew upon acquaintance. Walking at night in the tropics is pleasurable and healthy, but by day it is impossible. In the tropics one should do as the wild beasts do, viz., keep out of the sun and let beer alone.
