I seemed to have been appointed to a purely sight-seeing job.  One February noon I reported at the office to find that passes to Gatun had been issued to five of us, “Scotty,” “Mac,” Renson, and Barter among the number.  The task in the “town by the dam site” it seemed, was proving too heavy for the regular enumerators of that district.

We left by the 2:10 train.  Cascadas and Bas Obispo rolled away behind us, across the canal I caught a glimpse of the wilderness surrounding the abode of “Old Fritz,” then we entered a to me unknown land.  I could easily have fancied myself a tourist, especially so at Matachin when “Mac” solemnly attempted to “spring” on me the old tourist hoax of suicided Chinamen as the derivation of the town’s name.  Through Gorgona, the Pittsburg of the Zone with its acres of machine-shops, rumbled the train and plunged beyond into a deep, if not exactly rank, endless jungle.  The stations grew small and unimportant.  Bailamonos and San Pablo were withering and wasting away, “’Orca L’garto,” or the Hanged Alligator was barely more than a memory, Tabernilla a mere heap of lumber being tumbled on flatcars bound for new service further Pacificward.  Of Frijoles there remained barely enough to shudder at, with the collector’s nasal bawl of “Free Holys!” and everywhere the irrepressible tropical greenery was already rushing back to engulf the pigmy works of man.  It seemed criminally wasteful to have built these entire towns with all the detail and machinery of a well governed and fully furnished city from police station to salt cellars only to tear them down again and utterly wipe them out four or five years after their founding.  A forerunner of what, in a few brief years, will have happened to all the Zone—­nay, is not this the way of life itself?

For soon the Spillway at Gatun is to close its gates and all this vast region will be flooded and come to be Gatun Lake.  Villages that were old when Pizarro began his swine-herding will be wiped out, even this splendid double-tracked railroad goes the way of the rest, for on February fifteenth, a bare few days away, it was to be abandoned and where we were now racing northwestward through brilliant sunshine and Atlantic breezes would soon be the bottom of a lake over which great ocean steamers will glide, while far below will be tall palm-trees and the spreading mangoes, the banana, king of weeds, gigantic ferns and—­well, who shall say what will become of the brilliant parrots, the monkeys and the jaguars?

For nearly an hour we had not a glimpse of the canal, lost in the jungle to the right.  Then suddenly we burst out upon the growing lake, now all but licking at the rails beneath us, the Zone city of Gatun climbing up a hillside on its edge and scattering over several more.  To the left I caught my first sight of the world-famous locks and dam, and at 3:30 we descended at the stone station, first mile-post of permanency, for being out of reach of the coming flood it is built to stay and shows what Canal Zone stations will be in the years to come.  There remained for me but seven miles of the Isthmus still unseen.