So much for the sounds of the Culebra Cut on a work day. The sights are yet more wonderful. One who has looked upon the Grand Canyon of the Colorado will find in this man-made gash in the hills something of the riot of color that characterizes that greatest of natural wonders, but he who has had no such preparation will stand amazed before the barbaric wealth of hues which blaze forth from these precipitous walls. Reds predominate--red of as deep a crimson as though Mother Earth’s bosom thus cruelly slashed and scarred was giving up its very life’s blood; red shading into orange, tropical, hot, riotous, pulsing like the life of the old Isthmus that is being carved away to make place for the new; red, pale, pinkish, shading down almost to rose color as delicate as the hue on a maiden’s cheek, typifying perhaps the first blush of the bride in the wedding of the Atlantic to the Pacific. Yellow too from the brightest orange to the palest ochre, and blue from the shade of indigo which Columbus hoped to bring across this very Isthmus from the bazaars of Cathay; purple as royal as Ferdinand and Isabella ever wore, or the paler shades of the tropic sky are there. As you look upon the dazzling array strung out before you for miles you may reflect that imbedded in those parti-colored rocks and clays are semi-precious stones of varied shades and sorts--beryls, moss agates, bloodstones, moonstones which the workmen pick up and sell to rude lapidaries who cut and sell them to tourists. But in all this colossal tearing up of the earth’s surface there has been found none of the gold for which the first white men lusted, nor any precious stone or useful mineral whatsoever. [Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_ A DIRT-SPREADER AT WORK] [Illustration: “EVERY BITE RECORDED AT HEADQUARTERS”]