Mr. and Mrs. Burt (nee Reeves) were also for
sticking with the ship. All the women were going shopping on the
Atlantic side for linens, ivory and oriental silks, etc. "at
wonderful prices" (and they were--Tiffany prices). Then after
dinner everybody was to go to a night club the two doctors' wives
knew about. The ship's officers were ignored as to sailing time
and matters of other unimportance to Grace Line stockholders.
We reversed ourselves and stayed with the ship.
TO THE ATLANTIC BY SHIP
I shall not try to describe the feats of engineering the building
of the Panama Canal involved: Ridding the place of mosquitoes and
malaria; damming the outlet of a river so the mean level of the
new, partly man-made lake would be about 87 feet above the
Atlantic and Pacific Oceans; making cuts of 100 feet or more in
solid rock; dredging the channel so our ship drawing almost 30
feet could steam through.
Three giant locks on the Pacific side lifted us almost 30 feet
per lock, so at the third lock we could sail out into first a
winding canal and then into that tremendous lake whose new level
left thousands of islands of its former jungle hill tops in size
all the way from a few square feet to hundreds and probably
thousands of acres.
Pages:
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330
331
332
333
334
335
336
337
338
339
340
341
342
343
344
345
346
347