While technicians from all over the world directed laborgangs and steamshovels, ammunitionships loaded with tons of explosives sailed from every port for Panama and Colon. Though at first reluctant with their contributions, the countries had reconsidered and poured forth their shares without stint. All obsolete warmaterials were shipped to the scene of action. Prisons were emptied to supply the needed manpower and when this measure fell short all without visible means of support were added to the roll. Shortsightedly Costa Rica protested vigorously the proposed destruction of its entire territory and there were even momentary uprisings of patriots who proposed to defend their nation with the last drop of blood, but commonsense and international amity prevailed, especially when Costa Ricans were promised a territory twice as big as their native country in the hinterland between Colombia and Venezuela, a valueless tract both nations had been trying in vain to settle for decades. Night and day the detonations of highexplosives killed fish on both the Atlantic and Pacific sides of Central America and brought stunned birds plummeting down from the skies to their death. The coastal plains fell into the sea, great mountains were reduced to powder and little by little the gap between North and South America widened. But the progress of the work was infinitesimal compared with the advance of the Grass. It swept over the ancient Aztec empire down to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The ruins of Mayan civilization, excavated once, were buried anew. The demolition engineers measured their daily progress in feet, the Grass in miles. When the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific met in Lake Nicaragua, the Grass was in Yucatan. When the first green runners invaded Guatemala, a bare twenty miles of northern Panama had been demolished and hardly a start had been made in the destruction of Costa Rica. Fleets of airplanes bombed the connecting strip in the area left by engineers to the last, but as their flights went on the Grass crept into British Honduras. The workers sent another twenty miles of Panama into nothingness and the Grass completed the conquest of Guatemala. They blew up another ten miles and the Grass took over El Salvador. Dynamite widened the Nicaragua Canal to a ridiculously thin barrier as the Grass overran Honduras.