Читать книгу The Panama Canal - Frederic J. Haskin - Страница 22

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Culebra Cut! Here the barrier of the continental divide resisted to the utmost the attacks of the canal army; here disturbed and outraged Nature conspired with gross mountain mass to make the defense stronger and stronger; here was the mountain that must be moved. Here came the French, jauntily confident, to dig a narrow channel that would let their ships go through. The mountain was the victor. And then here came the Americans, confident but not jaunty. They weighed that mass, laid out the lines of a wider ditch, arranged complicated transportation systems to take away the half hundred million cubic yards of earth and rocks that they had measured. Nature came to the aid of the beleaguered mountain. The volcanic rocks were piled helter-skelter and when the ditch deepened the softer strata underneath refused to bear the burden and the slides, slowly and like glaciers, crept out into the ditch, burying shovels and sweeping aside the railway tracks. Even the bottom of the canal bulged up under the added stress of the heavier strata above.

Grim, now, but still confident, the attackers fought on. The mountain was defeated.

Now stretches a man-made canyon across the backbone of the continent; now lies a channel for ships through the barrier; now is found what Columbus sought in vain—the gate through the west to the east. Men call it Culebra Cut.

Nine miles long, its average depth is 120 feet. At places its sides tower nearly 500 feet above its channel bottom, which is nowhere narrower than 300 feet.

It is the greatest single trophy of the triumph of man over the terrestrial arrangement of his world. Compared to it, the scooping out of the sand levels of Suez seems but child's play—the tunnels of Hoosac and Simplon but the sport of boys. It is majestic. It is awful. It is the Canal.

When estimates for digging the canal were made, it was calculated that 53,000,000 cubic yards of material would have to be removed from the cut, and that under the most favorable conditions it would require eight and a half years to complete the work. But at that time no one had the remotest idea of the actual difficulties that would beset the canal builders; no one dreamed of the avalanches of material that would slide into the cut.

One can in no way get a better idea of the meaning of the slides and breaks in Culebra Cut than to refer to the accompanying figure. There it will be seen that whereas it was originally planned that the top width of the cut at one point should be 670 feet, it has grown wider, because of slides and breaks, to as much as 1,800 feet at one place. In all, some 25,000,000 cubic yards of material which should have remained outside the canal prism slipped into it and had to be removed by the steam shovels.