"Yes," chimed in Tom, "they couldn't cheat us out of it."
"The quickest route to the coast for us," added Bert, "and then the rest of the way by boat. I'm wild to set my feet once more beneath the Stars and Stripes."
CHAPTER VIII
THE GREAT CANAL
On a glorious afternoon, a few days later, the boys sat on the upper deck of the liner, as it drew near the city of Colon, on the Atlantic side of the Isthmus of Panama. With the quick rebound of youth, they had wholly recovered from the strain of the preceding days, and were looking forward with the keenest zest, to the opening of the great canal, now only two weeks distant. They gazed with interest at the Toro lighthouse, as the steamer left the gleaming waters of the Caribbean Sea, and threaded its way up the Bay of Limon to Cristobal, the port of Colon.
"And to think," Dick was saying, "that it's four hundred years almost to a day, since the isthmus was discovered, and in all that time they never cut it through. To cover that distance of forty-nine miles from the Atlantic to the Pacific, ships have sailed ten thousand, five hundred miles. It almost seems like a reflection on the intelligence of the world, doesn't it?"
"It surely does," asserted Bert, "and yet it wasn't altogether a matter of intelligence, but of ways and means. In every century since then, lots of people have seen the advantages of a canal, but they've been staggered, when they came to count the cost. It's easy enough to talk of cutting through mountains and building giant dams and changing the course of rivers. But it's a long jump from theory to performance, and they've all wilted until your Uncle Samuel took up the job. Even France, the most scientific nation in Europe, gave it up after she'd spent two hundred million dollars."
"It's a big feather in our cap," said Tom—"the very biggest thing that has happened in the way of engineering, since this old earth began. It's the eighth wonder of the world. The building of the pyramids was child's play, compared to the problems our people have had to meet. But we've met them—health problems, labor problems, political problems, mechanical problems—met and solved them all. The American Eagle has certainly got a right to scream."
And their enthusiasm for the American Eagle grew with every hour that passed, after they drew up to the docks and went ashore. Everywhere there were evidences of thrift and progress and law and order, to be seen nowhere else in Central or South America. After the slovenly towns and cities of Mexico, it was refreshing to note the contrast. For five miles on either side of the canal—the Canal Zone—it was United States Territory. From being the abode of fever and pestilence, it had been transformed into one of the healthiest places in the world. Mosquitoes had been exterminated and the dreaded scourge of "Yellow Jack" wiped out completely. It was a cosmopolitan district, where all the nations of the world met together and all classes were to be found, from the highest to the lowest. But over this mixed and often turbulent population, the civil and military arms of the United States, ruled with such strength and wisdom, as to make it a model for the world's imitation. The city was bright, clean, animated, abounding in amusements and diversions; but lawlessness and disorder were unsparingly repressed. The boys were delighted at the novelty of what they saw and heard, and it was late when they went to their rooms, with an eager anticipation of all that awaited them on their trip across the isthmus.
For this trip from end to end of the canal was one of the most cherished features of their general plan. They wanted to study it at their leisure—the dams, the locks, the gates, the lakes, the feeders, the spillways, the attractions—the thousand and one things that made it the marvel of the twentieth century. And they vowed to themselves that what their eyes did not take in would not be worth seeing.