To-day Culebra Mountain bows its lofty head to the genius of the American engineer and to the courage of the canal army. Through its vitals there runs a great artificial canyon nearly 9 miles long, 300 feet wide at its bottom, in places as much as a half mile wide at its top and nearly 500 feet deep at the deepest point. Out of it there was taken 105,000,000 cubic yards of material, and at places it cost as much as $15,000,000 a mile to make the excavations. Through it now extends a great ribbon of water broad enough to permit the largest vessels afloat to pass one another under their own power, and deep enough to carry a ship with a draft beyond anything in the minds of naval constructors to-day. With towering hills lining it on either side, with banks that are precipitous here and farflung there, with great and deep recesses at one place and another telling of the gigantic breaks and slides with which the men who built it had to contend, going through Culebra Cut gives to the human heart a thrill such as the sight of no other work of the human hand can give. Its magnitude, its awe-inspiring aspect as one navigates the channel between the two great hills which stand like sentinels above it, and the memory of the thousands of tons of dynamite, the hundreds of millions of money and the vast investment of brain and brawn required in its digging, all conspire to make the wonder greater. It is the mightiest deed the hand of man has done. CHAPTER VII ENDS OF THE CANAL While the completed Panama Canal does not wed the two oceans, or permit their waters to mingle in Gatun Lake, it does bring them a little closer together. On the Atlantic side a sea-level channel has been dug from deep water due south to Gatun, a distance of 7 miles. On the Pacific side a similar channel has been dug from deep water in a northwesterly direction to Miraflores, a distance of 8 miles. It follows that 15 of the 50 miles of the canal will be filled with salt water. The remaining 35 miles will be filled with fresh water supplied by the Chagres and the lesser rivers of Panama. The task of digging these sea-level sections was a considerable one and almost every method of ditch digging that human ingenuity has been able to devise was employed. Steam shovels, dipper dredges, ladder dredges, stationary suction dredges, and sea-going suction dredges, all contributed their share toward bringing the waters of the Atlantic to Gatun and those of the Pacific to Miraflores. In addition to these methods, on the Pacific side use was made of the hydraulic process of excavating soft material, washing it loose with powerful streams of water and pumping it out with giant pumps. [Illustration: THE DISASTROUS EFFECTS OF SLIDES IN CULEBRA CUT] [Illustration: W. G. COMBER U. S. LADDER DREDGE "COROZAL" AND ONE OF HER MUD BUCKETS] As one travels along the Pacific end of the canal he is reminded of the words of Isaiah: