COLONEL GOETHALS
And Old Bill May was right. When the morning express from Panama City stopped at Culebra, Colonel Goethals swung nimbly aboard and greeted our party as follows:
“Good morning. I’m sorry, but I can’t go to Gatun with you to-day; there’s a dock gone out at Balboa. Colonel Sibert will show you over Gatun. Good morning, good morning!”
Through the car window we saw him spring into a trim little railroad-motor, which slid clanging and whistling through the crowd at the station, and was half a mile down the track to Balboa before our train had started again for Gatun.
We traveled a curiously zigzag path, now on the old line of the Panama Railroad, now on the new. Ever since the first canoe-load of Peruvian gold was floated down from Cruces to the sea, nearly four hundred years ago, the valley of the Chagres has been the pathway of the isthmus. The Panama Railroad of the 1850’s, the days of lignum-vitæ ties, wood-burning locomotives, and twenty per cent. dividends, followed the banks and killed the river trade. To-day the rapidly rising waters of Gatun Lake have driven the railroad to higher ground to the east between Gatun and Bas Obispo. From that point the new permanent way was to have been carried through the cut on a berm, or shelf, on the east bank, ten feet above the water’s edge. It was a picturesque plan, but was reluctantly abandoned because of the danger from slides. So that part of the relocation has been built with great labor through the hills to the east of the cut, and is now finished and in use for freight. Not, however, for passengers, for the existing towns in the central division are all on the wrong side of the cut. Our train left Panama City on the old line, switched to the new at Corozal, crossed the cut on a temporary trestle near Pedro Miguel, and ran through Culebra and Empire, where in five years the macadamized and electric-lighted streets will be covered with second-growth jungle, to the busy railroad town of Gorgona, where the lake water will soon be lapping over the floors of the machine-shops. Here a coal-burning locomotive—oil-burners are the rule for passenger-traffic on the Panama Railroad—was attached to the rear of the train, to the disgust of the tourists on the observation-platform of the parlor-car. The train then ran backward up the other arm of the Y, across the dike at Bas Obispo to the new steel bridge across the Chagres at Gamboa, not far below ancient Cruces.
A RELIEF-MAP OF THE PANAMA CANAL FROM THE ATLANTIC TO THE PACIFIC
The rest of the way to Gatun ran through country marked on the map as part of Gatun Lake, but covered to-day with virgin jungle. Only in the channel and the anchorage-basin above the locks has the bottom been cleared of vegetation; elsewhere the finished “lake” will be one tangle of deadwood. Now near at hand, now miles away in the valley, the yellow line against the dark green shows where the rising water is drowning out the jungle. In a remarkably short time the leaves and small branches drop off, leaving the dead trunks gray and bare. The cocoanut-palms hold out the longest. The railroad runs high above the lake, on the solidest kind of stone embankments, containing millions of cubic yards of rock from the Culebra Cut. Probably the best-built fifty miles of road-bed in the Western Hemisphere is the relocated Panama Railroad.
From a photograph by Marine, Panama