Put on then a suit of khaki with stout shoes and take the train for Culebra. That will be as good a spot as any to descend into the Cut, and we will find there some airy rows of perpendicular ladders connecting the various levels up and down which an agile monkey, or Col. Gaillard or any of his assistants, can run with ease, but which we descend with infinite caution and some measure of nervous apprehension. Probably the first sound that will greet your ears above the general clatter, when you have attained the floor of the Canal will be a stentorian cry of “Look out, there! Look out”! You will hear that warning hail many a time and oft in the forenoon’s walk we are about to take. I don’t know of any spot where Edward Everett Hale’s motto, “Look Out and Not In; Look Up and Not Down; Look Forward and Not Back” needs editing more than at Culebra. The wise man looked all those ways and then some. For trains are bearing down upon you from all directions and so close are the tracks and so numerous the switches that it is impossible to tell the zone of safety except by observing the trains themselves. If your gaze is too intently fixed on one point a warning cry may call your attention to the arm of a steam shovel above your head with a five-ton boulder insecurely balanced, or a big, black Jamaican a few yards ahead perfunctorily waving a red flag in token that a “dobe” blast is to be fired. A “dobe” blast is regarded with contempt by the fellows who explode a few tons of dynamite at a time and demolish a whole hillside, but the “dobes” throw fifty to one hundred pound stones about in a reckless way that compels unprofessional respect. They tell a story on the Zone of a negro who, not thinking himself in range, was sitting on a box of dynamite calmly smoking a cigarette. A heavy stone dropped squarely on his head killing him instantly, but was sufficiently deflected by the hardness of the Ethiopian skull to miss the box on which the victim sat. Had it been otherwise the neighboring landscape and its population would have been materially changed.
ONE OF THE COLONEL’S TROUBLES
This shovel was overwhelmed by a slide. The accident is not uncommon
Photo by Underwood & Underwood
THE SLICED-OFF HILL AT ANCON
It is no wonder that we have trains to dodge during the course of our stroll. There are at the moment of our visit 115 locomotives and 2000 cars in service in the Cut. About 160 loaded trains go out daily, and, of course about 160 return empty. Three hundred and twenty trains in the eight-hour day, with two hours’ intermission at noon, means almost one train a minute speeding through a right of way 300 feet wide and much cluttered up with shovels, drills and other machinery. In March, 1911, the record month, these trains handled 1,728,748 cubic yards of material, carrying all to the dumps which average 12 miles distant, the farthest one being 33 miles. The lay mind does not at first think of it, but it is a fact that it was no easy task to select spots for all this refuse in a territory only 436 square miles in area, of which 164 square miles is covered by Gatun Lake and much of the rest is higher than the Cut and therefore unsuited for dumps. The amount of material disposed of would create new land worth untold millions could it have been dumped along the lake front of Chicago, or in the Hackensack meadows near New York.
Photo by S. H. Elliott
A LOCK-CHAMBER FROM ABOVE