FROM the wing of the Government hotel in which I stayed I looked out over the city of Panama to the Pacific. If this city were in Spain, or if even a decent description of it were in a European guide-book, the hordes of Americans who go to the Canal would rave over it. As it is, not many of them (not being told) ever see it, though there are few towns in Europe with more character. But I regret to say my countrymen don't know what they are looking at, or what to look at, till they have a guide-book, courier or tout to tell them. The Government provides, I am told, a Harvard graduate to perform the latter function, and sends out daily an observation car across the Continent.
The two strange, flat-topped mountains, miles out at sea, are to be fortified, and they are so far from shore, and the locks so far inland, as to be out of range—as well as out of sight—of modern guns and gunners.
XXVIII
THE MOUTH OF THE CANAL FROM THE SEA
THIS drawing was made from the channel which leads out to the Pacific Ocean. The mouth of the Canal is on the left in the flat space between the mountains; on the right of this, the dark mass on the edge of the water is the docks and harbors; then comes the great, towering Ancon Hill, one side all dug out in terraces for dirt, much of which goes to fill in the outside of locks, which, however, will work before they are filled in. And for what other purposes the War Department are going to use this Gibraltar they alone know. The other side, a mass of palms shelters the houses of the officials, and at the foot of the hill, to the right, Panama—as beautiful as Naples or Tangier, yet hardly a tourist knows it; and—well, the Government is not running a tourist agency.
The breakwater, which will connect the fortified islands miles away with the mainland, is just started in the centre. This is the first and last view of Panama—and of the greatest work of modern times, the work of the greatest engineers of all time.
Joseph Pennell