Returning from the upper waters of the Chagres one reaches Gatun Lake at Gamboa where the railway bridge crosses on seven stone piers. A little above is a fluviograph station fitted with a wire cable extending across the stream and carrying a car from which an observer may take measurements of the crest of any flood. Indeed the river is watched and measured to its very sources. It long ago proved itself unfit for trust, and one who has seen it in flood time, 40 feet higher than normal, bearing on its angry, tawny bosom houses, great trees, cayucas stolen from their owners, and dead animals, sweeping away bluffs at bends and rolling great boulders along its banks, will readily understand why the builders of the Canal stationed scouts and spies throughout the Chagres territory to send ample and early warning of its coming wrath. Leaving the Chagres, turning into Gatun Lake and directing our course away from the dam and toward the Pacific end of the Canal, we traversed a broad and placid body of water interspersed with densely wooded islands, which very soon narrows to the normal width of the Canal. In midsummer, 1913, when the author conducted his inspection, a broad dyke at Bas Obispo cut off Gatun Lake and its waters from the Canal trench, then dry, which here extends in an almost straight line, 300 feet wide, through steadily rising banks to the continental divide at Culebra. The railroad then crossed upon this dyke to the western side of the Canal and passed through several construction towns and villages, abandoned later when the Canal was filled and the railroad moved to the other side. Tourists with an eye for the spectacular used to stand on this dyke and speculate upon the thrilling sight when a huge blast of dynamite should rend the barrier, and in a mighty wave the waters of Gatun Lake should rush down the broad channel betwixt the eternal hills to make at last the long desired waterway from Orient to Occident. But unhappily Col. Goethals and his associates unsentimentally put the picturesque aside for the practical. No dynamite blast, no surging charge of waters through the cut, entered into their program. Instead with mighty siphons the water was to be lifted over the barrier and poured into the Canal for days until the two bodies of water were nearly at a level. Then by the prosaic use of floating dredges the dyke would be removed and the Canal opened from Gatun Locks to the locks at Pedro Miguel. [Illustration: PIERS OF THE ABANDONED PANAMA RAILWAY] CHAPTER XII THE CULEBRA CUT.