Very few of the higher Canal officers live at Colon, which is the Atlantic seaport of the Isthmus, the eastern mouth of the Canal, though Colon is west of Panama--such is the geography of the country.
The mouth of the Canal will be fortified; breakwaters and light-houses are being built.
For authorities on fortification it may be interesting to state that the forts will be so situated that the locks will be completely out of range of an enemy's guns. Personally I am not a believer in wars or navies. If my theories were practised there would be no need for fortifications.
Near Mount Hope, which--for the French--should be called the Slough of Despond, or the Lake of Despair, is a huge swamp about a mile or so from Colon, on the left bank of the French Canal, seen on the right of the lithograph. This swamp is now filled with all sorts of abandoned French machinery. Dredges, locomotives, and even what seem to be lock gates, show amid the palms in the distance. Huge American cranes for raising this French material--which the American engineers have made use of--and discharging cargo from the ships in the French Canal--which is here finished and in use--loom over the swamp, the banks of which are lined with piers and workshops full of life--a curious contrast to the dead swamp in which not a mosquito lives, nor a smell breathes.
Between Mount Hope and Gatun is much more of the swamp and much more abandoned machinery, but the Canal is not to be seen from the railroad, or any evidence of it, till the train stops at the station of Old Gatun, with its workmen's dwellings crowning the hillside. I regret I made no drawing of these, so picturesquely perched. At the station of Gatun--the first time I stopped--I saw the workmen--in decorative fashion--coming to the surface for dinner. The lithograph was made from a temporary bridge spanning the locks and looking toward Colon. The great machines on each side of the locks are for mixing and carrying to their place, in huge buckets, the cement and concrete, of which the locks are built. The French Canal is in the extreme distance, now used by our engineers.
There is a flight of three double locks at Gatun by which ships will be raised eighty-five feet to the level of Gatun Lake. From the gates of the upper lock--the nearest to the Pacific--they will sail across the now-forming lake some miles (about twenty, I believe) to the Culebra Cut; through this, nine miles long, they will pass, and then descend by three other flights of locks, at Pedro Miguel and Miraflores, to the Pacific, which is twenty feet higher, I believe, than the Atlantic. The great height, eighty-five feet, was agreed upon so as to save excavation in the Cut and time in completion--one of those magnificent labor-saving devices of the moment--which I, not being an engineer, see no necessity for--having waited four hundred years for the Canal, we might, as an outsider, it seems to me, have waited four more years and got rid of a number of the locks, even if it cost more money.