The President then told the story of the catastrophe as it had been narrated in the despatches received at the White House. He painted in graphic words the shaking down of the hills, the dislodged blankets slipping from the hill sides like a shawl from a shuddering woman, carrying with them the crashing trees, the jungle growth, the entwined tendrilous creepers and vines, while above the trees, swaying toward each other and then outward as if following the crests and troughs of hidden waves, above these tottering trees, the birds in screaming volleys rose and fell. The bared rocks showed rents, and tremendous explosions sent their shattered fragments into the air, while long weird groans issued from the ground as if the buried foundations of the hills were undergoing the tortures of mutilation. In other places it had been quite different. The ground slowly seemed to melt away, and with a sort of shuddering succession of chills the land disappears. How long, how much further this swallowing up of the land will go no one can tell. But it has seemed to those who have some knowledge of the region that it may embrace the S shaped Isthmus only, and that the tapering ends of the bulwarks of elevation in the Rocky Mountain chain on the north, and the Andes on the south will resist this degradation, that Costa Rica on the north and Columbia on the south will rudely define the north and south edges of the new avenue or gateway of unions between the oceans, that the new canal in this way, reconstructed by the titanic convulsions of nature, will become a wide and useful passage for commerce.