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Updated: May 15, 2025
This entire sandy district was covered, "cartload by cartload, spadeful by spadeful with good soil brought from elsewhere." It is now like a great flower garden and in fact much of it is flower beds. The city of Ghent is known as the flower city of Europe, there being a hundred nursery gardens and half as many horticultural establishments in the suburbs of this one city.
The people gave them some bread and butter, to induce them to go into the living grave prepared for them; and when the first spadeful of sand was thrown into the hole, one of the children cried out, 'Mother, they are throwing sand on my bread and butter! Comparing this with the treatment of witches, or women suspected of witchcraft, at the same epoch, it is not at all impossible that such senseless and cruel customs prevailed.
The first spadeful of sand of the Desert Railway was turned on the first day of 1897; but until May, when the line to Kerma was finished, no great efforts were made, and only forty miles of track had been laid. In the meanwhile the men of the new Railway Battalion were being trained; the plant was steadily accumulating; engines, rolling stock, and material of all sorts had arrived from England.
By sheer power of their wills they were combatting the snow, forcing the work ahead, deepening the stretch of excavation that had been opened that afternoon; by iron determination they were wrenching out the last spadeful of earth possible and exacting the final ounce of man power before the snow had its way. The strange warmth continued.
Fifty to a hundred men with adequate equipment could have gotten the thing up in a summer. It was only by forcing himself to think in terms of spadeful after spadeful of earth, cartload after cartload creaking behind straining beasts, timber after timber cut with axes and dressed with adzes, stone after stone and brick after brick, that he could appreciate it.
Jonas, in this way, made a kind of a trench all along the side of Rollo’s ground; and he told Rollo to be careful to throw every spadeful well forward, so as to keep the trench open and free, and then it would be easy for him to dig. Jonas then left him, and told him that there was work enough for him for three or four days, to dig up his ground well.
The navvy that lifted the first spadeful of earth in excavating for the railway line, and the driver of the locomotive over the completed track, are partners in the success and in the joy.
I could not understand most of what was said, nor did I know the meaning of any of the long words which I then heard for the first time; but there was one thing which I did understand, and this made me stop short in my work, afraid to dig another spadeful of earth.
Meanwhile the sultan was in his palace waiting till the fortieth day should dawn, and wondering that not one spadeful of earth should have been dug out of the hill. 'If that old woman has been playing me a trick, thought he, 'I will hang her! And I will put up a gallows to-morrow on the hill itself.
No, not the same thing as digging trenches anywhere! For it is really nearly as easy to dig trenches in the ocean. For every spadeful you throw out two fall in, and if, by the use of much cunning, you do manage to get a hole dug, then you must not leave it for a single instant, for it is only waiting until your back is turned to disappear.
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