at either entrance will be five hundred feet wide, and through the greater part of the Gatun Lake, a ship will steam at full speed down a magnificent channel one thousand feet broad, with no more danger of washing the banks than if she were in the middle of the lower Amazon.
To help night navigation, there will be long rows of acetylene buoys, so ingeniously made that the difference of a few degrees of heat regularly caused on the Isthmus by the rising and setting of the sun, will serve to turn their light off and on, by expanding and contracting a little copper rod. This device, invented by one of the American canal employees, has been thoroughly tested, and found to work perfectly. Everywhere trim little concrete lighthouses, looking strange enough in the jungle, are being built, or, rather, cast in one piece, on wooded hilltops that will soon be islands.
Already the yellow water is rapidly backing up, as the dam and the spillway gates are being raised. You can mark the spread of the lake by the gray of the dying, drowned-out trees against the green of the living jungle. Only in the channel and the anchorage basin has Gatun Lake been cleared of timber, and the greater part of it will be a mass of stumps and snags. The centuries-old trade-route down the Chagres has been wiped out, and more than a dozen little towns and villages, Ahorca Lagarto, Frijoles, San Pablo, Matachin,[1] have been moved to new sites on higher ground. It was not easy to make the natives believe that these places that had been inhabited for hundreds of years would soon be un-
- ↑ See Appendix.
