The Gatun locks, each chamber of which is a sort of "canyon of cement," will almost oppress the imagination with the sense of immensity. At the foot of the locks the vessel will surrender its own volition and entrust itself wholly to the canal operators. It will be attached to the electric apparatus ashore and gently towed into the lock-chambers. In less than an hour it should have climbed the three gigantic steps and be afloat on the surface of the lake, 85 feet above sea-level. The traveller might fail even to notice of himself the great dam which abuts on the locks to the west. He may be surprised to hear that the whole being of the canal depends upon that earthwork, and that with the Culebra Cut it absorbed the greater part of the labour and skill and solicitude of the canal-builders. The Gatun dam has indeed been so adopted and transfigured by Nature that it appears only a part, and not a very conspicuous part, of the landscape. Nor would our traveller, without previous information, guess the history of the great expanse of water which stretches to right and left up many a distant arm or loch and round many a picturesque island, and over which his vessel, once more resuming its own power and control, begins to advance. The buoys alone indicate that the channel, the true and well-wrought link between the two oceans, still holds its course through the bed of the lake. Mr. Bryce has pointed out what a pleasant interlude in a long ocean journey will be afforded by this placid glide of 22 miles over the inland lake from Gatun to Gamboa. The bottom widths through the lake are 1,000 feet for 16 miles, 800 feet for 4 miles, and 500 feet for about 3 miles. At Gamboa the vessel enters the eight-mile section of the Culebra Cut. Here again, though the traveller in future days will need no reminding of the enterprise represented by this tremendous trench driven through the backbone of the isthmus, he will have to imagine the busy scene during the days of construction which will then have disappeared. He must try to reproduce what was little less than a manufacturing town at Gorgona, just near the entrance to the Cut, where stood the machine shops, boiler shops, smith shops, car shops, pattern shops, where repairs of all kinds were made and machines of all sorts and sizes constructed. He should think of that model residential town to the west of the Cut where the chief engineer and his assistants lived, surrounded by the quarters of the men, each dwelling protected with its fine wire netting to exclude the mosquitoes, the whole settlement scrupulously clean and bright with well-kept lawns and flowerbeds. All this will have passed away with the crowds of workers who interrupted for a dozen years the stillness of the primeval forest. Nature and silence will in a large degree have resumed their sway, but the world will not forget the debt it owes to that conquering industrial army which divided the land here in order to unite the nations.