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." I slid down the face of government-made
cliffs on the seat of my commissary breeches. I fought my way up
again to stalk through long lines of men picking away at the dizzy
edge of sheer precipices. I rolled down in the sand and rubble of
what threatened to develop into "slides." I crawled under snorting
steam-shovels to drag out besooted negroes--negroes so besooted I
had to ask them their color--while dodging the gigantic swinging
shovel itself, to say nothing of "dhobie" blasts and rocks of the
size of drummers' trunks that spilled from it as it swung. I
climbed up into the quivering monster itself to interrupt the
engineer at his levers, to shout at the craneman on his beam. I
sprang aboard every train that was not running at full speed,
walking along the running-board into the cab; if not to "get" the
engineer at least to gain new life from his private ice-water