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I crawled under snorting steam-shovels to drag out besooted negroes negroes so besooted I had to ask them their color while dodging the gigantic swinging shovel itself, to say nothing of "dhobie" blasts and rocks of the size of drummers' trunks that spilled from it as it swung.
It was a big hole about a half-mile of hole. There were steam-shovels at work throwing out of that hole what I thought was red mud. "Kind sir, why are they throwing that red mud out of that hole?" I asked a native. "That hain't red mud. That's iron ore, an' it's the best iron ore in the world." "What is it worth?" "It hain't worth nothin' here; that's why they're movin' it away."
A richly fertile landscape, gradually merging into barren deserts and bushlands the time of the great planet-wide drought. The Canal Builders men with machines recognizable as steam-shovels and derricks, digging and quarrying and driving across the empty plains with aqueducts.
Then he said whimsically: "Thank God they can't set steam-shovels to work there and level those peaks and fill the canyons. Do you know?" his look returned briefly and the genial lines deepened "those mountains were my playground when I was a boy. My last hunting trip, the year I finished college, came to an untimely end up there in the gorge of the Dosewallups. You see it?
Far down below was the same struggling energy, the same gangs of upright human ants, the "cut" with its jangle and jar of steam-shovels and trains still stretching away endless in either direction.
The third day came, and high above me towered the rock cliffs of Culebra's palm-crowned hill, steam-shovels approaching the summit in echelon, here and there an incipient earth and rock "slide" dribbling warningly down.
Before and beyond were pounding rock drills, belching locomotives, there arose the rattle and bump of long trains of flat-cars on many tracks, the crash of falling boulders, the snort of the straining steam-shovels heaping the cars high with earth and rock, everywhere were groups of little men, some working leisurely, some scrambling down into the rocky bed of the canal 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.
On the second day I pushed past Cucaracha, scene of the greatest "slide" in the history of the canal when forty-seven acres went into the "cut," burying under untold tons of earth and rock steam-shovels and railroads, "Star" and "trypod" drills, and all else in sight except the "rough-necks," who are far too fast on their feet to be buried against their will.
It drops down beyond the station and charges across the lake by a causeway that steam-shovels were already devouring, toward forsaken Bohio.
"We remove here in April." "Again I apologize for my mere American grammar. Now, Henry, what is your room-mate's name?" "Well, we calls him Ethel, but I don't know his right title. "Do his parents live on the Zone?" "Oh, yes, sah, he has one father and one mother." To a six-foot black giant working as night-hostler of steam-shovels: "Well, Josiah, I suppose you're a Jamaican?"
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