"Try the abstract for a change."
"It's interesting at first, then it gets tiresome. Lord! It's fierce."
"The work, too?"
"Everything! Every day you do the same thing; every day you see the same faces, hear the same talk; even the breeze blows from the same direction all the time, and the temperature stays at the same mark winter and summer. Every time you go out you see the same coach-drivers, the same Spiggoty policemen leaning against the same things; every time you come in you eat the same food, drink the same liquor, sit in the same chair, and talk about the same topics. Everything runs too smoothly. The weather is too damned nice. The thermometer lacks originality. We're too comfortable. Climate like that gets on a white man's nerves; he needs physical discomfort to make him contented. I'd give a forty-dollar dog to be good and cold and freeze my nose. Why, Doctor Gorgas has made us so sanitary that we can't even get sick. I'd hail an epidemic as a friend.
"It's even harder on the women folks, for they can't find anything to kick about, so they fuss with one another and with us. They have clubs, you know, to improve things, but there's nothing to improve. We had a social war recently over a button. One clique wanted a club emblem that would cost a dollar and a half, while the other faction were in favor of a dollar button. I tell you, it was serious. Then, too, we're all tagged and labelled like cans of salmon with the price-mark on—we can't four-flush. You can tell a man's salary by the number of rocking-chairs in his house, and the wife of a fellow who draws eighteen hundred a year can't associate with a woman whose husband makes twenty-five hundred. They are very careful about such things. We go to the same dances on the same dates, we dance with the same people to the same tunes by the same band, and when we get off in some corner of the same veranda in search of the same old breeze, which we know is blowing at precisely the same velocity from the usual quarter, our partners tell us that Colonel So-and-So laid four hundred twenty-seven more cubic yards of concrete this week than last, or that Steam Shovel Number Twenty-three broke the record again by eighty yards. It's hell!" He stopped, breathless.
"Why don't you quit?" suggested Anthony.
"Quit! What for? Good Lord! We LIKE it. Here we are at Pedro Miguel, by-the-way. We'll be into the Cut shortly."
To his left Anthony beheld another scene somewhat similar to the one at Gatun. Other movable steel cranes, with huge wide-flung arms, rose out of another chasm in which were extensive concrete workings. From a distance the towers resembled parts of a half-constructed cantilever bridge of tremendous height. Another army was toiling at the bottom of the pit, more cars shunted back and forth, more rock-crushers rumbled; but, before Kirk's eye had photographed more than a small part, the motor-car had sped past and was rolling out upon a bridge spanning the Canal itself. To the northward appeared an opening cut through the hills, and Runnels said, simply:
"Culebra!"
A moment later he announced: "We leave the P. R. R tracks here and switch in on the I. C. C. Now you'll begin to see something."