What though this foreign nation gave you a bag
of peculiar pieces of metal for your trouble, when you had never
seen a score of such coins in your life and barely knew the use of
them, being acquainted with life only as it is picked from a
mango-tree? The foreigners had cried, "Take this money and go buy
a farm somewhere else," and you looked around you and saw all the
world you had ever really known the existence of sinking beneath
the rising waters. Where would you go, think you, to buy that new
farm? Even if you fled and found another unknown land high and
dry, or a town, what could you do, having not the remotest idea
how to live in a town with only pieces of metal to get food out of
instead of the mango-tree that had stood behind the house your
grandfather built ever since you were born and dropped mangoes
whenever you were hungry? To say the least you would be some
peeved.
It was midafternoon when the white bulk of Gatun locks rose on the
horizon. Then the lake opened out, the great dam, that is rather a
connecting link between two ranges of hills, spread across all the
landscape, and at four I raced up the muddy steps behind the
station to a telephone. Five minutes later I was hurrying away
across locks and dam to the marshland beyond the Spillway to
inquire who, and wherefore, had attempted to burn up the I.
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