The chase sent me more than once stumbling away across rock-
tumbled Gatun dam that squats its vast bulk where for long
centuries, eighty-five feet below, was the village of Old Gatun
with its proud church and its checkered history, where Morgan and
Peruvian viceroys and "Forty-niners" were wont to pause from their
arduous journeyings. They call it a dam. It is rather a range of
hills, a part and portion of the highlands that, east and west,
enclose the valley of the Chagres, its summit resembling the
terminal yards of some great city. There was one day when I sought
a negro brakeman attached to a given locomotive. I climbed to a
yard-master's tower above the Spillway and the yard-master, taking
up his powerful field-glasses, swept the horizon, or rather the
dam, and discovered the engine for me as a mariner discovers an
island at sea.
"Er--would you be kind enough to tell us where we can find this
Gatun dam we've heard so much about?" asked a party of four
tourists, half and half as to sex, who had been wandering about on
it for an hour or so with puzzled expressions of countenance. They
addressed themselves to a busy civil engineer in leather leggings
and rolled up shirt sleeves.
"I'm sorry I haven't time to use the instrument," replied the
engineer over his shoulder, while he wig-wagged his orders to his
negro helpers scattered over the landscape, "but as nearly as I
can tell with the naked eye, you are now standing in the exact
center of it.
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