We were soon off.  Settled back in the ample seat of the first real train I had boarded in months, with the roar of its length over the smooth and solid road-bed, the deep-voiced, masculine whistle instead of the painful, puerile screech that had recently assailed my ear, I all but forgot I was in a foreign land.  The fact was recalled by the passing of the train-guard,—­an erect and self-possessed young American in “Texas” hat, khaki uniform, and leather leggings, striding along the aisle with a jerking, half-arrogant swing of the shoulders.  So, perhaps, might I too soon be parading across the Isthmus!  It was not, to be sure, exactly the role I had planned to play on the Zone.  I had come rather with the hope of shouldering a shovel and descending into the canal with other workmen, that I might some day solemnly raise my right hand and boast, “I helped dig it.”  But that was in the callow days before I had arrived and learned the awful gulf that separates the sacred white American from the rest of the Canal Zone world.  Besides, had I not always wanted to be a policeman and twirl a club and stalk with heavy, law-compelling tread ever since I had first stared speechless upon one of those noble beings on my first trip out into the world twenty-one years before?

It was not without effort that I rose in time next morning to continue on the 6:37 from Corozal across another bit of the Zone.  Exactly thus should one first see the Great Work, piece-meal, slowly; unless he will go home with it all in an undigested lump.  The train rolled across a stretch of almost uninhabited country, with a vast plain of broken rock on the right, plunged unexpectedly through a short tunnel, and stopped at a station perched on the edge of a ridge above a small Zone town backed by some vast structure, above which here and there a huge crane loomed against the sky of dawn.  Another mile and the collectors were announcing as brazenly as if they challenged the few “Spigs” on board to correct them, “Peter M’Gill!  Peter M’Gill!” We were already moving on again before I had guessed that by this noise they designated none other than the famous Pedro Miguel.  The sun rose suddenly as we swung sharply to the left and rumbled across a girderless bridge.  Barely had I time to discover that we were crossing the great canal itself and to catch a brief glimpse of the jagged gulf in either direction, before the train had left it behind, as if the sight of the world-famous channel were not worth a pause, and was roaring on through a hilly country of perpetual summer.  A peculiarly shaped reservoir sped past on the left, twice or thrice more the green horizon rose and fell, and at 7:30 we drew up at the base of Culebra, the Zone capital.