you could with your hand; and every one of them is racing the others, and trying to beat the last man's record for a day's excavation. The present record was made on March twenty-second, 1910, when four thousand, eight hundred and twenty-three cubic yards of rock, or eight thousand, three hundred and ninety-five tons were excavated in eight hours by one machine. There are one hundred of these steam-shovels on the Isthmus, and more than fifty of them in the Gaillard Cut, and to see them all purring and rooting together, more like a herd of living monsters than a collection of machinery, is one of the most wonderful spectacles in the world.
Sometimes steam-shovels will be caught and buried by a "slide," an avalanche of rock or a river of mud brought down by some weakness in the banks. Wrecking trains and powerful railroad-cranes are always kept ready to go to their rescue. The worst place is across the Cut from the town of Culebra, where forty-seven acres of hillside are crawling down like a glacier. This is the famous Cucaracha Slide, that began to trouble the French as long ago as 1884; and though two million cubic yards of it have been dug away, there is half as much more to come. Altogether, this slide and the twenty others will have brought twenty million cubic yards of extra material to be taken out of the Cut, by the time the Canal is finished. But our engineers have learned how to stop them, by cutting away the weight at the top of each slide, and that, and the pressure of the water in the finished canal, should keep the banks at rest.
To carry away the rock and earth dug out by the steam-shovels, there is an elaborate railroad system of
