Page:The Mexican Problem (1917).djvu/83

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.

CHAPTER IV

WHO SHALL HELP THE ENGULFED PEOPLE?

When you have traveled nearly twenty-five hundred miles by land and water to reach at Cerro Azul the greatest oil well in the world, you see in the jungle only a cleared field, near the center of which is a mound of earth not twenty feet high, set against "mountains of blue," and the only evidence of human interest is an ordinary pressure gauge embedded near the top of this earth mound.

But you stand on the top of this little mound and feel the pulsation of something almost human beneath your feet a crater of energy that taxed the ingenuity of man for days to harness it and cap down a gas and oil pressure measuring above one thousand pounds per square inch, and flowing oil at a rate equaling about one quarter of the oil production of the whole world.

POSSIBILITIES OF DEVELOPMENT

One can but reflect that the Almighty permitted the tapping of his reservoirs of oil only