been no
flash and glitter of military uniforms on the Zone since the French
sailed for home, but every one knew "the Colonel" for all that, the
soldier who has never "seen service," who has never heard the shrapnel
scream by overhead, yet to whom the world owes more thanks than six
conquering generals rolled into one.
Scores of "trypod" and "Star" drills, whole battalions of deafening
machines run by compressed air brought from miles away, are pounding
and grinding and jamming holes in the living rock. After them will
presently come nonchalantly strolling along gangs of the ubiquitous
black "powder-men" and carelessly throw down boxes of dynamite and
pound the drill-holes full thereof and tamp them down ready to "blow"
at 11:30 and 5:30 when the workmen are out of range,--those mighty
explosions that twelve times a week set the porch chairs of every
I.C.C. house on the Isthmus to rocking, and are heard far out at sea.
Anywhere near the drills is such a roaring and jangling that I must
bellow at the top of my voice to be heard at all. The entire gamut of
sound-waves surrounds and enfolds me, and with it all the powerful
Atlantic breeze sweeps deafeningly through the channel. Down in the
bottom of the canal if one step behind anything that shuts off the
breeze it is tropically hot; yet up on the edge of the chasm above, the
trees are always nodding and bowing before the ceaseless wind from off
the Caribbean. Scores of "switcheros" drowse under their sheet-iron
wigwams, erected not so much as protection from the sun, for the
drowsers are mostly negroes and immune to that, as from young rocks
that the dynamite blasts frequently toss a quarter-mile. Then over it
all hang heavy clouds of soft-coal dust from trains and shovels,
shifting down upon the black, white and mixed, and the enumerator
alike; a dirty, noisy, perilous, enjoyable job.
Everywhere are gangs of men, sometimes two or three gangs working
together at the same task. Shovel gangs, track gangs, surfacing gangs,
dynamite gangs, gangs doing everything imaginable with shovel and pick
and crowbar, gangs down on the floor of the canal, gangs far up the
steep walls of cut rock, gangs stretching away in either direction till
those far off look like upright bands of the leaf-cutting ants of
Panamanian jungles; gangs nearly all, whatever their nationality, in
the blue shirts and khaki trousers of the Zone commissary, giving a
peculiar color scheme to all the scene.
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