But whereas the
continental European would sit down before the misfortune and
weep, the American swears a round oath, spits on his hands, and
pitches in to shovel the "slide" out again. He isn't belittling
the disasters; it is merely that he knows the canal has got to be
dug and goes ahead and digs it. That is the greatest thing on the
Zone. Amid all the childish snarling of "Spigoties," the back-
biting of Europe, the congressional wrangles, the Cabinet
politics, the man on the job,--"the Colonel," the average
American, the "rough-neck"--goes right on digging the canal day by
day as if he had never heard a rumor of all this outside noise.
Mighty is the job from one point of view; yet tiny from another.
With all his enormous equipment, his peerless ingenuity, and his
feverish activity all little man has succeeded in doing is to
scratch a little surface wound in Mother Earth, cutting open a few
superficial veins, of water, that trickle down the rocky face of
the "cut."
By March twelfth we had carried our task past and under Empire
suspension bridge, and the end of the "cut" was almost in sight.
That day I clawed and scrambled a score of times up the face of
rock walls. I zigzagged through long rows of negroes pounding
holes in rock ledges. I stumbled and splashed my way through gangs
of Martinique "muckers.
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