In the early days of the work this business of shifting tracks required the services of hundreds of men. But it grew so steadily under the needs of the service--they say the Panama Railway runs sideways as well as lengthwise--that the mechanical genius of American engineers was called into play to meet the situation. Wherefore behold the track-shifter, an engine operating a long crane which picks up the track, ties, rails and all, and swings it to one side three feet or more according to the elasticity of the track. It takes nine men to operate a track shifter, and it does the work which took 500 men pursuing the old method of pulling spikes, shifting ties and rails separately and spiking the rails down again. It is estimated that by this device the government was saved several million dollars, to say nothing of an enormous amount of time. While the Panama Railroad is only 47 miles long it has laid almost 450 miles of rails, and these are continually being taken up and shifted, particularly those laid on the bed of the Canal in Culebra Cut. It is perfectly clear that to keep the steam shovels within reaching distance of the walls they are to dig away, the track on which they operate and the track on which their attendant dirt trains run must be shifted laterally every two or three days. [Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_ A STEAM SHOVEL IN OPERATION] Looking up from the floor of the Canal one had in those days of rushing construction a prospect at once gigantic, brilliant and awe inspiring. Between Gold Hill and Contractors Hill the space open to the sky is half a mile wide and the two peaks tower toward the sky 534 feet to the one side and 410 on the other. We see again dimly through the smoke of the struggling locomotives and the fumes of exploding dynamite the prismatic color of the stripped sides of the hill, though on the higher altitudes untouched by recent work and unscarred by slides the tropical green has already covered all traces of man’s mutilations. In time, of course, all this coloring will disappear and the ships will steam along betwixt two towering walls of living green. [Illustration: BIRD’S EYE VIEW OF THE MIRAFLORES LOCKS] One’s attention, however, when in the Cut is held mainly by its industrial rather than by its scenic features. For the latter the view from above, already described, is incalculably the better. But down here in the depths your mind is gripped by the signs of human activity on every side. Everything that a machine can do is being done by machinery, yet there are 6000 men working in this narrow way, men white and black and of every intermediate and indeterminate shade. Men who talk in Spanish, French, the gibberish of the Jamaican, in Hindoo, in Chinese. One thinks it a pity that Col. Goethals and his chief lieutenants could not have been at the Tower of Babel, for in that event that aspiring enterprise would never have been halted by so commonplace an obstacle as the confusion of tongues.