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Author of "The Panama Canal" and "The Countries of the Caribbean," in the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE

T

HE only reason why ships have not been using the Panama Canal since last October is that Nature has been battling to the last ditch in her efforts to thwart the purpose of man to put a shipway through the vitals of proud old Culebra Mountain. But for this great battle, Culebra Cut would have been a finished job two years ago.

The weapons used by Nature in her efforts to confound the plans of the canal engineers have been slides and breaks in the banks of the canal, and effective weapons indeed have they proven. How, with them, she has stood between the canal army and the completion of the task to which it addressed itself constitutes the most thrilling episode in the history of canal engineering.

Over 250 acres of ground lying outside of the intended banks of the canal, and containing over 30 million cubic yards of material, have swept, with silent but terrific force, down into the canal. Now this onslaught has demoralized an entire railroad system; now it has put the compressed air and water systems out of commission; now it has bottled up one end of Culebra Cut with an avalanche of debris; now it has imprisoned dirt trains and wrecked steam shovels. But with all the wreck and ruin and chaos there have been men with wills of iron who have met each new situation with a new spirit of determination; men who have never

permitted any catastrophe to turn them aside from their ultimate purpose; men whose achievements in the face of unprecedented difficulties make a story as inspiring as anything in human history.

No one who failed to visit the Isthmus during the construction period can understand the full import of the coming of these slides into Culebra Cut. With each passing year they have renewed and redoubled their attacks on the canal plans. They seem to be maneuvered by the hand of some great marshal and sent forth to the fray in every way calculated to put the canal engineers to discomfiture.

Now they are quiescent, attempting to lull the engineers into a false security; now they make a feint, stopping short of an actual conflict; now they come in the dead of night, spreading chaos and disrupting everything in whatever direction they move; now they set up the appearance of being rendered thoroughly harmless by allowing dikes of basalt to peep out which seem to tie them to the bowels of the earth, only to destroy the hopes which these dikes arouse in the hearts of the besiegers, by shearing them off as if they were but pipe-stems, and then flowing, unrestrained, into the cut.

It

Consider what the removal of 30 million cubic yards of material means. is enough to build a sort of Chinese wall 7 feet thick and 7 feet high reaching from New York to San Francisco. It is

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more than could be drawn by all the horses and mules in the United States. It would fill a million and a half big Lidgerwood cars, enough to make a string 12,000 miles long. These figures show that the mere getting rid of this surplus material is no mean job.

But when you reflect that each yard of this sliding material has rendered doubly difficult the getting out of three yards of other material, the true meaning of the slides will begin to appear. There have been times when 170 trains were going out of the cut one day at the south end, only to be stopped entirely the next day by the Cucaracha slide getting busy. Now there may be a dozen tracks in use in the cut, and 24 hours later half of these will be out of commission. is what makes the slides such serious things to combat.

THE GREATEST ENGINEERING WONDER OF THE AGE

It is no wonder that the lamented Colonel Gaillard lost his health and his

life fighting them. It is no wonder that Colonel Goethals has aged 20 years in six while struggling with them. But it is a wonder, the greatest engineering wonder of the age, that in spite of these difficulties they have been able to remove 106 million cubic yards of material from the cut in less time than it was estimated that they could remove 53 million cubic yards. And this wonder grows when I look at their cost sheets and see them removing a cubic yard for an average of 60-odd cents, when it was estimated that, unhindered by slides, the cost of removing a cubic yard would be 98 cents.

Speaking of the terrific strain involved upon those who are responsible for the battle with the slides at Panama, no incident in my life can stand out more vividly than one I will now relate, illustrating the meaning of it all to the engineers. Cucaracha slide resumed her old tricks when I was on the Isthmus last May. She had been quiescent for some time,. and it was believed that she had retired from the fray for good and all.

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