Labyrinths Of The World: Secrets Of Easter Island 1.0 APK [Full]
Macabeo Eastman
The simplest way to realize its character is to considerit as consisting of four sections which I will call(a) the Atlantic Level, (b) the Lake, (c) the Cutting,and (d) the Pacific section (in two levels separated bya lock). The Atlantic Level is a straight channel,unbroken by locks, of eight miles, from deep waterat the mouth of the shallow Bay of Limon, a littlewest of Colon, to Gatun, where it reaches the valleyof the Chagres River. Now the Chagres River hadalways been reckoned as one of the chief difficultiesin the way of making a canal. It occupied the bottomof that natural depression along which all surveyorshad long ago perceived that any canal must run. Butthe difficulty of widening and deepening the riverchannel till it should become a useable canal, was aformidable one, because in the wet season the riverswells to an unmanageable size under the tropical rains,21sometimes rising over forty feet in twenty-four hours.This difficulty was at last met and the stream ingeniouslyutilized by erecting right across the courseof the Chagres a stupendous dam at Gatun, whichby impounding the water of the river turns its valleyinto a lake. This lake will have along the centralchannel a depth of from eighty-five to forty-five feet ofwater, sufficient for the largest ship. At the Gatundam there are three locks, built of concrete, with a totalrise of eighty-five feet, by which vessels will be liftedup into the lake. The lake will fill not only the valleyof the Chagres itself, but the bottom of its tributaryvalleys to the east and west, so that it will cover 164square miles in all, and will be dotted by many islands.The central and deepest line of this artificial piece ofwater, nearly twenty-four miles long, is the second ofour four canal sections, and will be the prettiest, forthe banks are richly wooded. At the point called BasObispo, where the Chagres valley, which has beenrunning south-southeast towards the Pacific turnsaway to the northeast among the hills, the line of thecanal leaves the Gatun river-lake, and we enter the thirdsection, which I have called the Cutting. Here hills areencountered, so it became necessary, in order to avoidthe making of more locks, to cut deep into the centralline of the continent, with its ridge of rock which connectsthe Cordilleras of the southern continent with theSierras of the northern. After five miles of comparativelyshallow cutting southward from the Lake, a talland steep eminence, Gold Hill, the continental watershed,22its top 665 feet high, bars the way. Through itthere has been carved out a mighty gash, the "CulebraCut," of which more anon. A little further south, eightmiles from the Lake, the ground begins to fall rapidlytowards the other sea, and we reach the fourth orPacific section at a point called Pedro Miguel. Hereis a lock by which the Canal is lowered thirty feet toanother but much smaller artificial lake, formed by along dam built across the valley at a spot called Miraflores,where we find two more locks, by which vesselswill be lowered fifty-five feet to the level of thePacific. Thence the Canal runs straight out into theocean, here so shallow that a deep-water channel hasbeen dredged out for some miles, and a great dyke ormole erected along its eastern side to keep the southerlycurrent from silting up the harbour. From PedroMiguel to Miraflores it is nearly two miles, and fromthe locks at the latter to the Pacific eight miles, so thelength of this fourth Pacific section, which, unlike theAtlantic section, is on two different levels divided bythe Miraflores dam and locks, is ten miles. In it therehas been comparatively little land excavation, becausethe ground is flat, though a great deal of dredging,both to carry a sea channel out through the shallowbay into the open Pacific, and also to provide space forvessels to lie and load or discharge without blockingthe traffic.
Ever since as a boy I had read of a great inland sealying between the two ranges of the Cordillera almostas high above the ocean as is the top of the Jungfrau,I had wondered what the scenery of such mountainsand such a sea might be like, and had searched booksand questioned travellers without getting from themwhat I sought. There are no other bodies of freshwater on the earth's surface nearly so lofty, except onthe plateaux of Central Asia, and none of these, suchas the Manasarowar lakes in Tibet25 and Lake Sir-i-kulin the Pamirs is nearly so extensive as this lake in Peru.It fills the lower part of an immense shallow depressionbetween the eastern and western Cordilleras; and the120land both to the north and to the south of it is for a greatdistance so level that we may believe the area coveredby its waters to have been at one time far greater. Itspresent length is about one hundred and twenty miles,its greatest width forty-one miles, and its area nearlyequal to that of Lake Erie. The shape is extremelyirregular, for there are many deep bays, and manyfar projecting promontories. There are also manyislands, two of which, famous in Peruvian mythology,I shall presently describe.
On this majestic range our eyes had been fixed all daylong. Its northernmost summit, Illampu, stands morethan twenty miles back from the eastern shore of thelake, and more than thirty miles from the Island of theSun. Thence the chain trends southward, ending onehundred miles away in the gigantic Illimani, whichlooks down upon La Paz. All day long we had watchedthe white clouds rise and gather, and swathe the greatpeaks and rest in the glacier hollows between them, andseem to dissolve or move away, leaving some top clearfor a moment, and then settle down again, just as onesees the vapours that rise from the Lombard plain forminto clouds that float round and enwrap Monte Rosaduring the heats of a summer day. Evening was beginningto fall when our vessel, after coasting alongthe island, anchored in the secluded bay of Challa,where, behind a rocky cape, there is an Indian hamlet anda garden and stone tank like that at the Bath of theInca. We landed and rambled through it, findingits thick trees and rustling shade specially charmingin this bare land. Just as we emerged from themand regained the lake shore, the sun was setting,and as the air cooled, the clouds that draped the mountainsthinned and scattered and suddenly vanished, andthe majestic line of pinnacles stood out, glowing rosy redin the level sunlight, and then turned in a few momentsto a ghostly white, doubly ghostly against a deep blue-greysky, as swift black night began to descend.
Returning to the railway at Uyuni, we set off in theafternoon on our southward way across the desert floor,here perfectly flat and about 12,000 feet above thesea. A deep red soil promised fertility if water could bebrought to it, but there was not a tree nor a house, thoughmany a mirage shewed shining water pools and treesaround them. Rocky hillocks rising here and there likeislands strengthened the impression that this had beenin some earlier age the bed of a great inland sea, largerthan Lake Superior in North America, stretching fromhere all the way to the Vilcañota peaks north of Titicaca,and including, besides Titicaca itself, the salt lagoonof Poopo and the white salt marsh we had seen fromthe heights of Pulucayo. Subterranean forces which, as198we know, have been recently at work all over these regions,may have altered the levels, and alterations oflevel may, in their turn, have induced climatic changes,which, by reducing rainfall, caused the inland sea todry up, as the Great Salt Lake of Utah and the AralSea are drying up now. Looking eastward, we couldsee heavy clouds brooding over the eastern ranges,which shewed that beyond it lay valleys, watered by therains which the trade-wind brings up from the far-distantAtlantic. Presently the sweetest hour of the daycame as the grey sternness of the heights to the southsoftened into lilac, and a pale yellow sunset, such asonly deserts see, flooded the plain with radiance. Thenight was intensely cold, and next morning, even ateight o'clock, the earth was frozen hard in the deep,dark hollow where the train had halted.
East of Cape Froward, one is at once in a differentregion with a different climate. The air is drier andclearer. The shores are lower, the wood, still mostlyof the Antarctic beech, is thicker, with many deadwhite trunks which take fire easily. The hills recedefrom the sea, and grow smoother in outline, finallydisposing themselves in low flat-topped ridges, six oreight miles behind the shore-line. A wide expanse ofwater, and of land almost as level as the water, stretchesout to the eastern horizon, so that at first one fanciesthat this apparently shoreless sea is part of the Atlantic,which is in fact still nearly a hundred miles away. Signsof civilization appear in a lighthouse at San Isidro,and near it at a small harbour on the mainland to whicha few whalers resort, boiling down into oil the produce300of their catch. Presently the masts and funnels ofvessels lying off shore at anchor rise out of the sea, andwe heave to and disembark at the little town of PuntaArenas on the Patagonian coast, which English-speakingmen call Sandy Point. This is the southernmost townnot only in Chile, but in the whole world, twentydegrees further from the South Pole than Hammerfest,an older and larger place, is from the North Pole.It consists of about six very wide streets, only partiallybuilt up, running parallel to the shore, whichare crossed at right angles by as many other similarstreets, running up the hill, the houses low, many ofthem built, and nearly all of them roofed, with corrugatediron. It has, therefore, no beauty at all exceptwhat is given by its wide view of the open sea basinof the Strait, here twenty miles wide, and beyond overthe plains of Tierra del Fuego, the great island which liesopposite. In the far distance mountains can in clearweather be seen in the south of that island, MountSarmiento conspicuous among them.