Man is making war on nature with amazing energy on a titanic scale. The disorder seemed hopeless, but one realized that these little figures moving about it in the man-made cañon were achieving the seemingly impossible none the less.
"Isn't it wonderful?" Evelyn asked for the tenth time, as we looked down on a machine which had just seized a section of track and hoisted it up, rails and ties complete, to swing it over to another place.
I quoted to her Damon Runyon's verses:
We are ants upon a mountain, but we're leavin' of our dent,
An' our teeth-marks bitin' scenery they will show the way we went;
We're a liftin' half-creation, and we're changin' it around,
Just to suit our playful purpose when we're diggin' in the ground.
"You Americans take the cake," Blythe admitted. "You never tire of doing big things."
His eyes had come back to a group of young engineers who had just entered the car. The grimy sweat had dried on their sooty faces and their hands were black and greasy. They wore no coats and their shirts, wet from the perspiration drawn by the hot Panama sun, stuck to the muscular shoulders.
They looked like tramps from their attire, but Olympians could not have carried in their manner a blither confidence. These boys—I'll swear the oldest could have been no more than twenty-five—had undertaken to cut asunder what God has joined.
It did not matter to them in the least that they looked like coal miners. The only thing of importance was the work, the big ditch. Yet I knew that these were just such splendid fellows as our technical schools are turning out by thousands.
A few years before their thoughts had been full of cotillions and girls and the junior prom. The Isthmus had laid hold of them and hardened their muscles and bronzed their faces and given them a toughness of fiber that would last a lifetime.
They had taken on responsibility as if they had been born to it. A glow of pride in them flushed me. I was proud of the country that could fling out by hundreds of thousands such young fellows as these.