Another illustration of the magnitude of the quantity of material excavated at Panama may be had from a comparison with the pyramid of Cheops, of which noble pile some one has said that "All things fear Time, but Time fears only Cheops." We are told that it required a hundred thousand men 10 years to make ready for the building of that great structure, and 20 years more to build it. There were times at Panama when, in 26 working days, more material was removed from the canal than was required to build Cheops, and from first to last the Americans removed material enough to build sixty-odd pyramids such as Cheops. Were it all placed in one such structure, with a base as large as that of Cheops, the apex would tower higher into the sky than the loftiest mountain on the face of the earth.
Still another way of arriving at a true conception of the work of digging the big waterway is to consider that enough material had to be removed by the Americans to make a tunnel through the earth at the equator more than 12 feet square.
[Illustration: A GRAPHIC REPRESENTATION OF THE MATERIAL HANDLED AT PANAMA]
But perhaps the comparison that will best illustrate the immensity of the task of digging the ditch is that of the big Lidgerwood dirt car, on which so much of the spoil has been hauled away. Each car holds about 20 cubic yards of dirt, and 21 cars make a train. The material removed from the canal would fill a string of these cars reaching about three and a half times around the earth, and it would take a string of Panama Railroad engines reaching almost from New York to Honolulu to move them.
Yet all these comparisons have taken account of the excavations only. The construction of the Panama Canal represents much besides digging a ditch, for there were some immense structures to erect. Principal among these, so far as magnitude is concerned, was the Gatun Dam, that big ridge of earth a mile and a half long, half a mile thick at the base, and 105 feet high. It contains some 21,000,000 cubic yards of material, enough to build more than 500 solid shafts like the Washington Monument. Then there was the dam at Pedro Miguel--"Peter Magill," as the irreverent boys of Panama christened it--and another at Miraflores, each of them small in comparison with the great embankment at Gatun, but together containing as much material as 70 solid shafts like our Washington Monument.