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About The Sunday Oregonian. (Portland, Ore.) 1881-current | View Entire Issue (March 19, 1905)
3S TOE SUNDAY OREGOKIAN, PORTLAND, MARCH 19, 1905. ank G. Carpenter Write of the Great Cut for the Canal at Culebra ME SlJK, f r ! " rV l IN' THE CULEBRA CUT, Isthmus of Panama. March 2. Special Cbw respondence ol the Sunday Orcgonian.) I have come- to Panama to tell you how Uncle, Sam is digging his his ditch from ocean to ocean. I have traveled over.the line of the canal from the AUan tic to the Pacific, have talked with the engineers of the varions sections, and, in company kith Chief Engineer Wallace and Governor Davis, have walked over the greater part of the Culobra out. I sit in the Culebra cut as I -write, with thousands of men at work about me. with steam drills boring holes Into the rocks for blasting, and with the new steam shovels puffing: away as they load the cars, each doing the work of hundreds of men. I am In the midst of the mountains. Bagged, rough and covered with a dense growth of vegetation, they-rise high .above the great rocky gorge in wnich the ex cavation is now going on. Below me the water lies in the bottom of the cut, and looking up and down the .gorge I can see the work of the French engineers. They labored 30 years, and spent here and" in Paris $280,000,000 in gold; but they worked in the dark; and with boodllng and bad. business, accomplished only one tenth of this excavation. The French were fine engineers on paper, but they never ascertained the cost estimates of mcnK machinery and materials which are absolutely essential to any rational deduc tion as'to the time it -will take to build thet canal or the money needed for the purposfe. What is Being Done at Panama. This it) what the Canal Commissioners and the chief engineer are doing today. They are making the teste which will form the basis of all estimates and con tracts for the work of the future. There are now gangs of men all along the line of the canal under the chargo of skilled Tfals mp. made from one of the old French lithographic presses at Panama, shows the excavation, or cut, that muat be made for the canal from Colon to Panama. By the scale of miles. It will be een that It i 47 miles Ions. The peak at Culebra ! about 320 feet high, but here about 150 feet have been cut out. Only tbe black is earth. The Shaded portions represent various klnd oi rooks and mixture of earth and rock. The altitudes are given in feet. Colors i& i; engineers lootcing into every cost element of the canal construction. Some parties are at the headwaters of the Chagres. and others at various places along its course making boring for tunnels and dams.. Others are preparing the way for the harbor excavations at the Atlantic and Pacific ends of the canal and others are testing every foot of the dredging to be made through the lowlands and on the rises to the Culebra cut. Here at Culebra there is a small army at, work, a part of it using the old French machinery and others working the great steam shovels, testing the different sec tions of the pass and ascertaining to a cent and minute just what it will cost in time and money to get each kind of rock and earth -out. This work is experiment al, but at the same time practical. Every day takes out arid carries away a mass of material -which "will not have to be han dled again, and this while the work is be ing organised and tested for the great un dertaking of the future. In addition to this the sanitation proj ects are golngj-apldly on. The vegetation has been cut away from the score and more towns which lie on both onds of the Panama railroad, and drains made off into the bushes. The streets of Panama City arc -dug up or the new sewers and waterworks, and. a great reservoir for a supply of fresh water has been made In the mountains. The architects and carpenters are ev erywhere preparing quarters for the men. Hundreds of the old French buildings are being remodeled, and the sound of the hammer and saw can be heard from one nd of the isthmus to the other. The old French materials have been chopped out of the bushes, and machine shops have been erected at Panama, Colon, Bas Matachln, Empire and at other places along the route. Indeed, tho whole canal zone has begun to hum, and from now on It will bu one of the industrial bee hives of the world. The employes at work, Americans and natives, already number something like 5000. and this force will be steadily Increased until It is three or four times as great. Uncle Sam's Big Ditch. Indeed, the work planned here is so vast that I can only describe it by simplifying the figures by homely comparisons. In the first place, let us take a blrd's-oye view of the canal. It is to cross tbe Isthmus, about the middle of the Panama Republic, a country which Is as long as from Washington City to Boston, via New York, and which rangos in width from 20 to 180 miles. The canal is to go through one of its narrowest parts, but it winds its way this way and that, and the distance from ocean to ocean will be about 45 miles, and with the dredging necessary at the entrance in the Atlantic and Pacific just about 0 miles. Looking at the map the job seems a chore in comparison with the Suez Ca nal, which Is 100 miles long; with Kiel, .which is 70 miles, or with the Grand Ca nal of China, "which runs north and south for more than 1000 miles, crossing two mighty rivers, through a territory popu lated by millions. This view of the canal changes when one stands on the ground. The Job increases in size, and a trip over the route shows even the amateur that It Is the most stu pendous engineering construction ever undertaken by man. At the two ends of the route the canal runs through river valleys, the Chagres on tbe Atlantic, and the Rio Grando on the Pacific. Here the ground is low and swampy and the ex cavation will not be more difficult than that of Sues, X little farther inward the land begins to rise, but there is plen ty of room to pile the excavated materials on the banks, and the "work can be handled much like that of the Chicago drainage canal. Farther still you come to the mountains, and you arc in the Culobra pass, where lies tho great problem of the work, which forms the chief subject of my letter today. The Culebra pass Is. in fact, one of the lowest passes of the Andes, those mighty mountains which in South America Tise more than four miles above the sea.. and which drop down as they cross the Isth mus on their way north to Join hands with our Rockies. In this country there mountains are on the average only about one-third of a mile high, and here at Culobra their highest peaks are just about 300 feet above the sea. This height the French have cut down 150 feet, leaving us in round numbers 150 feet more to cut befpre we reach sea level, and about 200 feet before we get to the bottom of Uncle Sam's ditch, which will have to be dug 40 feet below sea level to accommodate the big ships of the day. In this statement I assume that we will have a sea-level canal. That is the gen eral opinion here at Panama, although no one is wiping to make that statement for publication. This cutting at Culebra will be on the average eight or ten miles long for the upper levels, but it lengthens as it goes down, and It will be 25 miles long when it approaches the level of the sea. ' It Is composed of rock and Garth, which will have to be gouged out -and carried away to let the oceans flow through. In other letters I shall describe the problems of the Chagres, the construction of the har bors and the other engineering works now planned. They are all. however, subordinate to the big part of the Job, which is the digging out and carrying away of this great mass In the center of which I sit. A Ditch Twice Around the World. I wish I could make you see it as it rises about me. the rock and earth ex tending in strata of various kinds up the sides of the mountains, with car tracks running along the levels, and the ma chinery and men working away. Here the rock is hard, there it looks like coal, and farther on it seems as soft as clay. Some of the upper levels are clay, and now and then a landslide occurs, covering both men and machinery. An enormous amount hae been done, and the chief en- 1ST giheer tells me there are yet more than 1 100,000,000 cubic yards to be gotten out before the canal prism can be made. This j 100,000,000 cubic yards is from the Culebra cut alone. One hundred million cubic yards! The figures convey nothing to minds be low those of the chief engineer or an Isaac Newton,. and I doubt if even they could tell you what they mean. Let us figure the matter out for ourselves. A cubic yard of earth, is a block of earth a yard wide. a yard long and a yard thick. Take a hundred million such blocks, and suppose them to be the sections of a ditch a yard wide, a yard deep and 100,000,000 yards long, and you begin to see what the Culebra cut means. But stop. One hundred million yards is 300.000,000 feet. That is the length of onr ditch. Now In round numbers 6000 feet make a mile, and dividing the 300.000,(0) feet by that we have 00,000 miles as the length of our ditch. In other words, if the earth were solid the Culebra cut ex cavation which Uncle Sam has yet to make would equal a ditch three feet wide and three feet deep,; long enough to go two times around this 25.000-mlle globe, with 10.000 miles of ditch to spare. The left-over would equal a tunnel three feet square through the center of the earth and one-fourth of the way back. A grizzly bear or a 300-pound hog could crawl through that tunnel. Take another comparison. It is only 240,000 miles from the earth to the moon. That ditch. If the space between were solid ground, could be dug; one-fourth of the way there -with the same labor; and, as the moon is only 2100 miles around. such a ditch could girdle that great body 25 times and leave plenty over for side tracks. What Handling the Dirt Means. But there Is another big element in the Culebra prpblem which makes it enor mously greater than the construction of a ditch of that kind. In our ditch the rock and earth could be thrown on tho banks. Here It must not only be dug and blasted out. but it must be carried an average distance of ten or 12 miles away. A thousand olevators could not lift It over the hills on each side of the cut. It could not be stored on the slopes of the mountains. All the valleys about here could be filled up level with the dumping of a hundred tn part of it. It must be carried on cars far off to other valleys or dumped into the Pacific Ocean, -which is about 12 miles away. This means. an enormous amount of hauling. Indeed, this whole mass would have to be carried about ten miles from where it now lies. Let us take a homely glance at that Item. A cubic yard is roughly estimated to weigh a ton. I am something of a farmer, and in the Virginia hills where I live a ton is a good load for two horses. Suppose this 100.000,000 cubic yards, each yard a ton. loaded on two-horse wagons and give each wagon and team a space SB feet long on the roadway, making a chain of 100.000.000 wagons carrying this mass of earth. Let the chain start at Panama and move onward. Where would the first wagon be when the last wagon Is loaded? It would be ten times as far away as the length of our big ditch. Tho train would have to be COO. 000 milea long long enough to reach to the moon and back again, with enough left over to go almost five times around the world. Tho whole line of wagons would reach exactly 24 times around the globe. The Question of Time. All this excavation work at Culebra has to go on In the short space of eight miles. This limits the number of men and ma chines which can, be employed at one tirao end it forms a big element in estimating the length of the job. Figured out by the former commission, it would require 20 years to complete It; but with tho best of modern machinery and American business methods two or -three shifts a day will bo -3G had and by means of electricity the work will go on night and day all the year through. At this early period the chief engineer does not pretend to give an opin ion as to the cost of the canal nor as to the time it will take to finish it. He does not say and has not said whether he thought a lock canal would be pref erable to a sea-level canal. He only says that he is here as the servant of the canal commission, of the President and the American, people, ready to do to the best of his ability what they shall decide they want done. He is now gathering the information by practical work, which will enable him to figure out what each kind of canal will cost and how long it will take to build It. To show you how such things are calcu lated let me give you an estimate of the handling of this 100,000,000 cubic yards at Culebra. Tbe cars they are using here will each carry just ten cubic yards, and 20 cars can be hauled In one train, mak ing 200 cubic yards to a train. Therefore, if this whole mass is loaded upon cars it will take 500,000 trains to haul it away. Now suppose you can load 200 trains In a day. This, according to the ten-hour I Ail of tho opinion that the expression by which God is said to be "All in j All" means that he ia "All" in each Individual person. Now he will be "AH" In each Individual person In this way: When all rational understanding, cleansed from the dregs of every sort of vice, and with every cloud of wickedness swept away, and when all that can. cither foci or understand or think will bo wholly God, and when It will no longer behold or re tain anything else than God, but when God will be the measure and standard of all its movements. Thus God will be "All," for there will no longer be any distinction of good and evil, seeing 'evil nowhere exists, for God. is all things, and to him no -evil Is near, nor will there bo any longer a desire to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil on the part of him who Is always in posses sion of. good and to whom God is all. The last enemy, moreover, who is called, death, is said on this account to be de stroyed, that there may not be anything left of a mournful kind when death does not exist, nor anything adverse, when there Is no enemy, moreover, who is called death. The destruction of this last enemy, in deed, is to be understood not as it Its substance which was formed "by God is to perish, but because Its mind and hostile will, which comes not from God, but from Itself, are to bS destroyed. FRAGMENTS. "Baptism is an escape from matter": the Lord leading us out of disorder, Illu minating us by bringing us Into the light which Is shadowless and is material no longer. Mellto to Antonlus Caesar. O50 A. r.) It is not easy epeedlly to bring into the right way tho man who has a long time previously been held fast by error. It may, however, be effected, for, when a man turns away ever so little from error, the mention of the truth is acceptable to him. For just when the cloud breaks ever so little there comes fair weather; evea so. when a man turns toward God, the thick cloud of zrror which deprived him of vision is quickly withdrawn from be fore him. For error, like disease and sleep. long holds fast those who come under its in fiuence. but truth uses the word as a goad and smites, the. slumberers, and T? , T? F"1 1 . l w XV7 These Include Extracts From Origin Referred Fragments rrom nattiest nnsnan writings ir jf to by Dean Robinson 3S- Y.3? rate now prevailing, means the loading i and carrying away of 20 trains every j hour, or a train every three minutes all the working day through. But there are 500,000 trains to be taken out, and, di viding this by 200, the dally rate, we get 2500 days as the time required to haul out this earth at three minutes to the train. But 2500 days at 25 working days to the month equals 100 months, which di vided by 12 gives us S& years as tbe time needed to haul out the material at that rate of speed. But three minutes Is a very short time to load a train. Tho time must be doubled and quadrupled by ad ditional tracks and sections of work, so that 12 minutes, or 24 minutes, may be allotted to each train. This means a great railroad organi zation. It means four systems of double track railways, one on each side of the center lino of the cut and one at each end leading from the excavation to the spoil banks. It means a vast number of steam shovels, so worked by a continu ous stream of cars that they will never be Idle. It means. In short, the most thorough organization under the chief en gineer that the human mind can conceive when they are awakened they look at the truth and also understand it; they hear and distinguish that which Is from that which is not. For those men who call iniquity right eousnessnow the sin of which I speak is this: When a roan abandons that which really exists, and serves that which does not really exist. There is that which really exists and which is called God. He. I say. does really exist, and by his power does everything subsist. This Be ing Is in no senso made, nor did he ever come into being; but he has existed from all eternity, and will exist for ever and ever. He changeth not. while everything else chnges. No eye can see him nor thought apprehend him, nor language describe' him, and those who love him speak of him thus: Father and God of Truth. Art thou (a person) of liberal mind, and familiar with the truth; if thou wilt properly consider these matters. commune with thine own self; and though they should clothe thee, in the garb of a woman, remember that thou art a man. Believe in him who is in reality God. and to h(m lay open thy mind, and to him commit thy soul, and ha is able to give thee Immortal life forever, lor every thing is possible to him; and let all other things be esteemed by thee just as they are Images as images and sculptors as sculptors, and let not that which Is only made be put In by thee in place of him who is not made, but let him, tbe ever living God, be constantly present to thy mind. (For thy mind Itself ia his like ness; for it, too. is Invisible and impalpa ble, and not to be represented by any form, yet by its will is the whole bodily frame moved.) Know therefore, that. If thou constant ly serve him who is immovable, even he who exists forever, endows with life and knowledge. But why this world was made and why it passes away, and why tbe body exists, and why it fails to decay, and why it continues, thou canst not know until thou hast raised thy head from this sleep In which thou hast sunk, and hast opened thy eyes and seen that God is One. the Lord is all. and hast come to serve him with all thy heart. Then will he grant thee to know his will; (for everyone that is severed from the knowl edge of the living God is dead and buried even while in this body). Therefore, is It that thou dost waljow on the ground be fore demons and shadows, and askest vain petitions from that which hast not anything to give. From Dionysius. (240 A. D.) Extracts -from, a fragment of one of his or the human will execute, and this I believe is possible under Mr. Wallace. Indeed, the chief engineer will soon know Just what he can do with each kind of labor and every kind of machin ery. He is testing the isthmian labor to see how much a man la worth per hour and whether he can be depended upon. So far he finds that one-third of the na tive labor lays off all the time, and he has to have 100 men employed to be sure of 70 turning up. He is testing the old French machinery to see whether it will pay to use It, and also the new machinery, getting every element of cost in a cubic yard, of excavation. He now knows to a cent, every day, just what each cubic yard, which is taken out costs In fuel, la bor, transportation to dumps, in mining and blasting. In maintenance of tracks and in general expense, so that he . can see at a glance which items are high and how they can be cut down. This Is being dono with several thousand men at work actually excavating enormous amounts of material. The product, how ever, is nothing in comparison with, the value of the knowledge gained for esti mating tha work of the future. Nothing books. Only a few of his writings were saved in a mutilated form: There certainly was not a time when God was not the Father, neither, as though he had not brought forth these things did God afterwards beget tho Son, but because the Son has existence not from himself, but from the Father being tho brightness from the eternal light, ho himself is absolutely eternal, for slnco light Is always in existence, it Is manifest that the brightness also exists, because light is perceived to exist from the fact that It shines. But this word "I am" expresses the eternal substance. If he is this reflection of the eternal light, he must also be eter nal himself. For If the light subsists forever, it is evident that the reflection subsists for ever; and that this light subsists is known only by its shining, neither can there be light that does not give light. We come back, therefore, to our Illustration. If there is day there 13 light, and if there is no such thing, 'the sun certainly cannot be present. If, therefore, the sun had been eternal, there should also have been endless day. Now, however, as it is not so, the day begins when the sun rises and ends when the sun sets. But God is eter nal light, having neither beginning nor end. And along with him there Is no reflec tion, also without beginning and ever lasting. The Father, then, being eternal, tbe Son also is eternal, being light of light; and If God is tbe light. Christ is the reflection. From Gregory Thaumaturgus. (250 A. D.) Therefore, he says, "Be of good cheer, 4T have overcome the world"; and this he said not as holding before us any contest! proper only to God, but as showing our own Cesh its capacity to overcome sufr fering and death, and corruption. In order that, as sin entered into the world by flesh, and death camo to reign by sin over men, the sin in the flesh might also be condemned, through the self-same flesh in tbe likeness thereof; and that the overseer of sin, the tempter, might be overcome, and death be cast down from its sovereignty and the corruption in the burying of the body done away. And the fruits of the resurrection be shown and the principle of righteousness begin the courso in the world through faith and the kingdom of heaven preached to men, and fellowship be- established be tween God and men. Copy qf Isaiah, lviii: S. .as found by a of this kind was ever done by the French. Just now the advance guard of the great army of American machinery is at work in the cut. I wish I could show you these big steam shovels which are working away under my eye. The word shovel gives no idea of them. Each is a gigantic machine worked by a steam ten-' gine, with a steel dipper as big around as a hogshead .and great steel teeth at its end half as long as your arm. This dipper is raised and lowered by the touch of a button. It grinds Its way Into the rock and gouges out five two-horse wagon loads of stuff at a bite, and lifts it up and drops it down on the car. Two bites are a load for a car, and. Indeed, some times one bite means almost that much. I saw one shovel pick up a rock weigh ing ten tons and lift it to the car trucks as though it were feathers. Each of these shovels working steadily at ten hours a day, can handle 25.000 cubic yards in a month, which, taking our ditch Illustration, means an excava tion three feet wide, three feet deep and 15 mlle3 long. If it works day and night it can gouge out a ditch 30 mile3 long in one month. This means that one shovel writer in the second century, showing how the text has been altered since then: "Loosen every knot of iniquity: release oppression of every contract (which have no power); .let the troubled go in peace, and break every unjust engagement," Cyprian on Jealousy and Envy. (Written About 250 A. D.) To be jealous of what you see to be good, and to be envious of those that are better than yourself, beloved brethren, seems in the eyes of some people to be a slight and petty wrong, and being thought trifling and of small account, it is not feared. Not being feared it Is not contemned (neglected) being con temned, it is not easily shunned, and it thus becomes a dark hidden mischief, which, as it is not perceived, so as to he guarded against by the prudent, secret ly distresses incautious minds. But, more over, the Lord bade us be prudent, and charged ns to watch with careful solici tude lest the adversary, who is always on the watch, and always lying in wait, should creep stealthily into our breasts, and blow up a flams from the sparks, magnifying small things into the great est, and so while soothing the unguarded, and careless with a milder air and softer breeze, should stir up storms and whirl winds, and bring about tbe destruction of faith, the shipwreck of salvation, and of life. He goeth about every ono of us; and even as an enemy besieging those that aro shut up In a city, he examines the walls and. tries whether there is any part of the walls less firm and less trustworthy by entrance through which he may pen etrate to tho inside. He presents to the eye seductive forms and easy pleasures, that he may destroy chastity by the sight. He provokes the tongue by reproaches, be Instigates the hand by exasperating wrongs, to the reck lessness of murder; to make the cheat, he presents dishonest gains to take captive tho soul by money; he heaps together mis chiefs unheard; he promises earthly honors that ho may deprice of heavenly ones; he makes a show of false things that he may steal away the true. Therefore beloved brethren, against all the devil's deceiving snares, or open threatenlngs. tho mind ought to stand arrayed and armed ever as ready to repel, as the foe Is ever ready to attack, and hence those darts of his which creep upon ns in concealment are more frequent and h)s more- hidden and secret hurling of them is tho more severely and frequently effectual fa our wounding In proportion as it is less per ceived. Let us also be watchful to understand working night and day will dig more than a mile of ditch in that time , In a year it would make a ditch from Washington: City to Albany. Something less than a score of these machines have been ordered, and four; are already at work. It is the intention of the chief engineer, when the excavation Is in full blast, to have 100 such shovels plugging away , and thousands of cars keeplngfthem busy day In and night out. As to the question of labor, the French at one time had several thousand men at work, but they never had a force equal to these machines. Each shovel can do the work of 500 men, and when we have 100 of them stationed here we shall have 60,000 men bottled up in steel men who will not get yellow fever, and who will not lay oft for malaria, who will never grow tired and never strike. We may have trouble with the 10,000 or 15,000 hu man beings who will be hewers of wood and drawers of water, but this great ma chine force of 50,000 men Is what under good business direction wiljt give Uncle Sam his canal at a lower cost and in a shorter time than the ordinary mind can conceive. FRANK G. CARPENTER. and repeal these, among which is the evil of envy and jealousy; And if any one closely look Into this, ne will find that nothing should be more carefully guarded against by the Christian, nothing more carefully watched than being taken cap tive by envy and malice. But through envy of the devil, death entered Into the world; therefore, they who are on his side Imitate, him. Hence in fine began the primal hatred. The un righteous Cain Is jealous of the righteous Abel, In that the wicked persecutes the good -with envy and Jealousy. He was un righteously stricken who had been the flr3t to show righteousness. He endured hatred, who had not known how to hate. Did not the Jews perish for kthis reason that they choose rather to envy Christ than to believe him? Dis paraging those great works which He did, they were defeelved by blinding jeal ousy, and could not open the eyes of their ( hearts to the knowledge of divine things. Considering these things, beloved breth ren, let us with vigilance and courage fortify our hearts dedicated to God against such a destructivenes3 of evil. Moreover, there is no ground for any one to suppose" that evil of that kind is con fined to one form or restrained within brief limits in a narrow boundary. The mischief of jealousy, manifold and fruitful, extends widely. It is the root of all evils, the fountain of disasters, the nursery of crime; the material of trans gressions; thence arise hatreds, thence proceed animosities. The mischief is much more trifling, the danger less, the cure easy,, when the wound is manifest But the wounds of Jealousy are hidden and secret, nor do they admit of the rem edy of a healing cure, since they have shut themselves In blind suffering within the lurking places of tbe conscience. Whoever you aro that are envious or malignant, observe how crafty, mischiev ous and hateful you are to those you hate. Yet you are the enemy of no one's well-being more than your own. Whoever he is whom you persecute with jealousy can evade and escape you. Tou cannot escape from yourself. Wherever you may be. your adversary 13 with you. your enemy Is always within your "own breast: your misphief is shut up within you. Tou are captive under the tyranny of jealousy. Jim Persimmons I reckon dat's a. ten horse, power automobile I Pete Possum Wot you reckon dat machine's cot ten. times as much power as dis horye o" mlna? I Sim Persimmons No twenty time aa mucbv-d&t looks like a one-half ho rso-power horse dat ya got. drt I Puck. -