THE END OF THE BIG JOB
HUMAN ACHIEVEMENT AND HUMAN NATURE ON THE CANAL ZONE,—INCLUDING A CONVERSATION WITH COLONEL GOETHALS
BY FARNHAM BISHOP
THE chauffeur of the railroad-motor shook his head.
“The observation-platform’s been taken down, sir, and the track leading to it torn up. That part of the bank’s ready to go out any minute. You can get a good view of the cut, though, from the Y. M. C. A. Building.”
When, in 1906, Uncle Sam put up this building in Culebra, and officially christened it an “I. C. C. Club-house,” because it was the Government, and not the Y. M. C. A., that was paying the shot, he placed it at some little distance from the cut. But in August, 1912, the club-house was very near the cut,—nineteen inches nearer than its own concrete foundation-piers,—and if it had not been lifted and braced with heavy timbers, it would long ago have gone tobogganing down the bank. As I walked through the reading-room, it moved and creaked like a wicker basket with the shock of a heavy blast; but the other men in the room did not raise their eyes from their magazines. From the back porch I looked down into the Culebra Cut, a wider, deeper cut that had completely swallowed up the one I knew well in 1910. Then the fifty-odd giant steam-shovels had been scattered over the nine miles from Bas Obispo to Pedro Miguel; now I saw them concentrated in and about the deep gulch between Gold Hill and Contractor’s Hill for the last battle of the long campaign. From here to where the dike at Bas Obispo keeps out the rising waters of Gatun Lake they are taking up the construction tracks, and the rank jungle-grass grows thick on the bottom of the finished, empty canal.
Between Gold Hill, advance-guard of the Andes, and Contractor’s Hill, southernmost point of the Rockies, lies the deepest part of the cut, and the nearer the big steam-shovels dig down to grade, the harder it is to haul away their spoil. Double-engined and coupled together, the dirt trains climb the steep grade in pairs. First come two straining, spouting Moguls, then a string of loaded “Lidgerwood flats,” like a hill on wheels; then a third locomotive, a string of swaying, clanking “Oliver dumps,” their side-chains jingling like artillery-harness; and last a fourth locomotive, detached, which, with the air of an enthusiastic small boy, comes running up behind to help push. The marbled mass of steam and soft-coal smoke takes strange colors in the tropic sunlight, then shreds away, revealing a patch of vividly blue sky, a palm, and a lone steam-shovel eating away the top of a slide on the edge of the opposite bank.
Whenever a fresh slide begins to break down the bank of the Panama Canal, Colonel Goethals, like the Duchess in “Alice in Wonderland,” cries, “Off with its head!” Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of slides, both curable by decapitation. The first is a mass of soft clay, resting on a sloping ledge of rock, made slippery by seeping rain-water. When dug away at the bottom, the whole hillside begins to slip down, usually with the deliberation of a glacier, but often with the rush of an avalanche. The second kind of slide is caused by the collapse of a stratum of rock under the weight resting upon it. Some of the hard volcanic material in the cut, laboriously blasted out with dynamite, crumbles into dust on exposure to the air. This failure of the foundations causes a lateral pressure against the bottom of the cut, sometimes heaving it up fifteen or twenty feet. In either case, the remedy is to lighten the load on the top of the bank, often aggravated by the presence of an old French dump-heap. Now that the famous Cucaracha (Cockroach) Slide, that began to plague De Lesseps in 1885, and increased until forty-seven acres were in motion, is nearly, or quite, at rest, the two largest slides are the ones that have at last swallowed up the Culebra club-house, and the even larger landslide on the opposite bank. Between them, since 1907, they have involved the movement of nearly seven million cubic yards of earth and rock. A few days after my visit, a notice was posted at the door of the club-house, warning all who entered the building that they did so at their own risk, and workmen began to tear it down, and the bank where the observation-platform used to stand, a few hundred yards away, “went out” with a rush, to the tune of 900,000 cubic yards.
But Colonel Goethals is not worrying about the slides. He said to me: