It was
February morning before I climbed the steps of silent 47 and
stepped under the shower-bath that is always preliminary, on the
Zone, to a night's repose.
A dream of earthquake, holocaust, and general destruction
developed gradually into full consciousness at four-thirty. House
47 was in riotous uproar. No, neither conflagration nor foreign
invasion was pending; it was merely the houseful of engineers in
their customary daily struggle to catch the labor-train and be
away to work by daylight. When the hour's rampage had subsided I
rose to switch off the light and turned in again.
The rays of the impetuous Panama sun were spattering from them
when I passed again the jumbled rows of invalided locomotives and
machinery, reddish with rust and bound, like Gulliver, by green
jungle strands and tropical creepers. By day the arch-roofed
labor-camps were silent and empty, but for a lonely janitor
languidly mopping a floor. Before the buildings a black gang was
dipping the canvas and gas-pipe bunks one by one into a great
kettle of scalding water. But there are also "married quarters" at
Cunette. A row of six government houses tops the ridge, with six
families in each house, and--no, I dare not risk nomination to an
ever expanding though unpopular club by stating how many in a
family.
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