or
dodging the clanging trains, all far below and stretching endless in
either direction, while over all the scene hovered a veritable
Pittsburg of smoke.

All long-heralded sights--such is the nature of the world and man--are
at first glimpse disappointing. To this rule the great Culebra "cut"
was no exception. After all this was merely a hill, a moderate ridge,
this backbone of the Isthmus the sundering of which had sent its echoes
to all corners of the earth. The long-fed imagination had led one to
picture a towering mountain, a very Andes.

But as I looked longer, noting how little by comparison were the trains
I knew to be of regulation U. S. size, how literally tiny were the
scores upon scores of men far down below who were doing this thing, its
significance regained bit by bit its proper proportions. Train after
train-load of the spoil of the "cut" ground away towards the Pacific;
and here man had been digging steadily, if not always earnestly, since
a year before I was born. The gigantic scene recalled to the mind the
"industrial army" of which Carlyle was prone to preach, with the same
discipline and organization as an army in the field; and every now and
then, to bear out the figure, there burst forth the mighty cannonade,
not of war, but of peace and progress in the form of earth-upheaving
and house-rocking blasts of dynamite, tearing away the solid rock below
at the very feet of the town.

I took to the railroad and struck on further into the unknown country.
Almost before I was well started I found myself in another town, yet
larger than Culebra and with the name "Empire" in the station building;
and nearly every rod of the way between had been lined with villages of
negroes and all breeds and colors of canal workers. So on again along a
broad macadamized highway that bent and rose through low bushy ridges,
past an army encamped in wood and tin barracks on a hillside, with
khaki uniformed soldiers ahorse and afoot enlivening all the roadway
and the neighboring fields. Never a mile without its town--how
different will all this be when the canal is finished and all this
community is gone to Alaska or has scattered itself again over the face
of the earth, and dense tropical solitude has settled down once more
over the scene.

Panama, they had said, is insupportably hot. Comparing it with other
lands I knew I could not but smile at the notion. Again it was the lack
of perspective. Sweat ran easily, yet so