作者：房龙
出版社：外语教学与研究出版社
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太平洋的故事(大师经典文库)(英文版)试读：
1 The Panama Canal
WHY is it that the truly great experiences of one's life are apt to be so exceedingly simple?
As a child I had heard all about the Panama Canal. Early in the fifties a brother of my grandmother had moved to Brazil. He had survived yellow fever and revolutions and had amassed a considerable fortune. When I was six or seven years old he had come back to Holland, bringing his family—his wondrous family of dark-eyed, dark-haired daughters. They had made such a stir in our little Dutch town that soon they had felt obliged to escape to the delights of Paris and the Riviera, which were much more to their rather exuberant Latin tastes than the simple pleasures of an evening at home with some unknown cousin, who in his Spartan simplicity had felt rather awkward before this overgenerous display of feminine beauty and charm.
I am afraid that these French peregrinations were not an unlimited success. For one day they had suffered a humiliation from which they never fully recovered. They were mighty proud of their jet black hair and wore it in long braids that almost reached to their feet. Well, one fine morning they had climbed to the top of a bus to proceed to Fontainebleau. The bus was crowded and they had been pushed hither and yon, and when they reached their destination—oh, ghastly discovery!—their hair was gone!
It was of course quite a common occurrence during the late eighties of the previous century to have one's hair stolen. It was needed for the manufacture of those chignons which were then highly popular and were contraptions of human hair meant to be worn underneath those crazy little hats which now, after an absence of almost fifty years, have once more made their appearance. The supply of false hair being necessarily limited (for no living Chinese would then have dreamed of divesting himself of his queue), a class of professional hair-stealers was then successfully operating not only in Paris but in every large city of the continent. The poor Brazilians had been easy victims and the labor of twenty painful years of brushing and combing had been rapidly undone by the quick clip of a sharp pair of scissors.
Discovery of the Pacific
Somehow or other, that event made a very deep impression upon my youthful mind and it made me conscious of the existence of a people called the French. The Eiffel Tower, coming to me at about the same time (it was the year of the great Paris exhibition) in the form of an inkstand, a watch charm and a paperweight, also helped the good work along, and finally the Indian suits which generous uncles and aunts brought back to me from Buffalo Bill's contribution to the Grande Exposition turned me into an ardent Francophile.
Alas, the only way in which I could give evidence of my feelings at that time (I was all of seven years old) was by a close application to my studies of the noble French tongue. I bravely struggled with j'ai, tu as, j'eusse, je fusse and all the other perplexing problems of a language so infinitely more complicated than my native Dutch, in which, as all of us knew, the good Lord had originally written the Major Catechism of our Reformed Church, and soon I had acquired a sufficient facility in this queer idiom to fish the Paris Illustration out of that cardboard "portfolio" which the bookstore used to send us once a week and to be able to translate the simpler captions of its fascinating and intriguing pictures. And in that way I learned a good deal about a gentleman by the name of Ferdinand de Lesseps, who having dug the Suez Canal had now set bravely out to repeat his success on the Isthmus of Panama but who, in some mysterious way, had got no further than the door of a French jail.
The details of the "Panama scandal" did not become clear to me until many years later but at least I learned a lot about the geographical aspects of that narrow strip of land which separates the Atlantic from the Pacific and which appeared to be a region of inaccessible mountains and deep ravines, all of them inhabited by wild natives and wilder crocodiles.
You know how it goes with such childish recollections. They are as persistent as the weeds in the grass of your garden. You can plow them up, poison them, burn them down, and a few days later, behold! There they are again as if nothing had happened. As a result, for almost half a century, the Isthmus of Panama remained to me just that a region of high mountain peaks, dense forests, wild natives and even wilder crocodiles.
Therefore, when at an ungodly hour, the steward knocked on the door and said, "In a few moments we will be in Cristobal. Sir," I quickly slipped into a dressing-gown, put on a pair of sandals and hastened to the deck, to hear me say to myself, "Lord help us all! the Captain took the wrong course! We are going into the Hook of Holland!" For the distant landscape was about as exciting as the coast of my native land and what I supposed to be the entrance to the canal looked as impressive as the mouth of the river Maas or the Scheldt.
Of course, when we came a little closer, I noticed certain differences. Everything was not entirely flat. There were a few low hills, but for the rest, I would not have been in the least surprised if the vessel had landed me in Rotterdam instead of the city which the ever-courteous and obliging American Government so generously called after the great Italian discoverer when it erected its own harbor at the northern entrance of the proposed canal to avoid any direct contact with the plague-hole which since the middle of the last century had been known as Golon.
Of that old Golon very little seems to remain William Aspinwall had founded it as a terminal for his railroad across the Isthmus and during the hopeful days of that enterprise (A.D. 1850) it had been known as Aspinwall. This name being a little too complicated for the contemporary Panamanians (then in full possession of this tract of land), it had shortly afterwards been changed into the much simpler and easier Spanish name of Colon (Columbus to us). It had also been most magnificently neglected. Soon its streets had become marshes, ideally suited for the purpose of breeding yellow fever mosquitoes, and when in the year 1903 our government, after a most efficiently stage-managed one night revolution, had acquired the right to a narrow strip of land leading from the Pacific to the Atlantic, one of the stipulations of the famous treaty of peace had granted the United States full sanitary control over the big cities of the newly established Republic of Panama.
The rest of the story can best be summed up in one single word—Gorgas. For without the thoroughgoing ministrations of this modern miracle-man, there never would have been any canal. There would have been (as there had been in the days of poor de Lesseps) a vast variety of cemeteries, hiding the pathetic remains of those faithful Spaniards and Frenchmen and Cubans who had so valiantly struggled to dig this little trench in this Godforsaken land of malaria and yellow fever while it was still under control of the French Canal Company.
Whereas today, the canal region is a health resort, where a mosquito has no more chance to survive than the proverbial snowball in Hades. In less than two years, this quiet spoken Southern gentleman had performed his herculean task and could thereupon leave it to another officer of the United States Army to do the actual digging and to give us that short cut from the Atlantic to the Pacific which had been one of man's most cherished dreams ever since that evening of the twenty-fifth of September of the year 1513, when Vasco Nunez de Balboa, from his silent "peak in Darien" had solved the problem of the Great South Sea, of which shortly afterwards he was to become the "Grand Admiral and Commander-in-Chief."
Cross section of the Panama Canal
Alas for poor Balboa! Poor, serious, hard-working and incompetent Balboa! Restlessly he had crossed and recrossed his Isthmus, founding cities, erecting forts, sending glowing descriptions of his conquest to His Most Catholic Majesty in far-off Spain. Others, less delicate in their methods (to indulge in a slight understatement), had wanted his job. And one of them had got it. He had got it by the simple expedient of having Balboa arrested on trumped-up charges. A packed tribunal had thereupon done the rest and less than four years after he had first climbed his famous peak and had shouted his triumphant "There it is!" The discoverer of the Pacific Ocean had been decapitated as a traitor and an enemy to the crown.
One often hears it said that republics are ungrateful. Within the domain of the Canal (as I shall hereafter call it), this statement is not borne out by the facts. Both Goethals, who did the digging, and Gorgas, who made the digging possible, were duly honored by the governments they served so faithfully and so efficiently and at an annual salary which must have horrified all believers in "private enterprise". For these sound businessmen regarded the income of a major of the Medical Corps, U. S. A., and of a colonel of the Engineering Corps, U. S. A. as mere cigarette money and made no bones about saying as much. I am not enough of an economist to know whether they were right or wrong, but I would like to stop here for a moment and say something that has been on my mind for a considerable number of years.
I have, during a fairly long life as a newspaperman, come in contact with a great many officers of both our army and our navy. I am, of course, familiar with the objection of so many of our modern and enlightened minds whose personal dislike for physical exertion (or lack of courage or anything you like to call it) is rather apt to make them scoff at the products of both Annapolis and West Point. They talk about the uselessness of so much meaningless drilling. They complain of the rigidity of the curriculum and denounce the mental restrictions imposed upon those who live by the rule of thumb of the War Department. I have come to a quite different conclusion. Except perhaps for the fact that as a rule these graduates of our two military institutions have much better manners than their academic colleagues. I have invariably found them to be much like the professors in our better-class universities, simple and direct, gentlemen who uncomplainingly accept whatever task is wished upon them and ask for no mercy.
Today they may be called upon to administer a couple of islands in the Pacific. Tomorrow they may be told to dig a trench through twenty miles of mountains or to fish an aviator out of the sea or to prevent Japanese poachers from putting a complete end to the race of the nimble seal without at the same time provoking the wrath of the very sensitive gentlemen who are now in control in Tokyo. The applause they receive in case they are successful is usually a little less than nothing at all. On the other hand, the blame they get in case they fail is almost always much more than they deserve. Yet there never seems to be any lack of candidates for this sort of a career. Those who do not like the "military idea", explain this by pointing to the ease and the regularity of the officer's existence. It is true, the profession gets scandalously underpaid, but it promises a regular income to all those who care to observe a few very elementary rules connected with the idea of "being a gentleman". And—come good times, come bad times—the check is there on the dot and unless Uncle Sam himself should go bankrupt, there is no danger that any of our gold-striped officials will ever be told that the firm cannot meet its obligations.
Furthermore, promotion, although slow, is completely automatic and the most ambitious of young men will not proceed much more rapidly than some mediocre pen-pusher in an obscure office somewhere on the top floor of the Navy Department, whose only claim to fame rests in his proud boast that he has never made a mistake.
The Panama Canal
That is what we are apt to hear when we listen to our pacifists and many of our intellectuals. But my own recollections of the sort of men who wear the United States uniform (a recollection now covering a period of some thirty years) do not quite bear this out. On the contrary, I found most of these men quite eager to do whatever they had been told to do, with that extra touch of devotion and loyalty which constitutes the difference between just another job and a piece of craftsmanship.
I have often wondered why it should be that way and why so many exceedingly bright and capable young men should be perfectly willing to forego the possible rewards inherent in business and in the professions when they must have known that, financially speaking they could never get anywhere at all. I think that I have found the answer. They preferred that sort of career because they felt themselves to be unfit for the competitive form of existence which is the beginning and end of our modern economic form of life.
I am not going to hold a brief for either that attitude or the opposite. It all depends, I think, on the way you were born. For example, there are a large number of people who seem to derive a positive pleasure from selling something to someone else. But there are others who would rather starve to death than try to persuade a stranger to buy something he neither wants nor needs. And these poor fellows are at their very worst whenever they are obliged to try and sell themselves.
The army man and the naval officer belong to the category which is under no obligation to do this in order to go about their allotted tasks. Their work is forever being observed and scrutinized by invisible eyes. Their character is well known to all their superiors, who for years have lived with them in close harmony in some army post or on board a battleship. Their habits and customs and manners are known to all their colleagues. There may of course be a certain amount of favoritism in the services, for personal likes and dislikes are unavoidable as long as we are men and not angels. But that evil, too, seems to have been reduced to a minimum by an elaborate set of checks and counterchecks. In short, once a military man has made up his mind to eschew the fleshpots of our present competitive system and has ordered his tailor to provide him with a uniform and brass buttons displaying an eagle or an anchor, he knows that his future will depend almost entirely upon his own efforts and that he will not be forced to enter into that rather disheartening (not to say disgusting) pushing and crowding and kicking-the-other-fellow-in-the-pants which is an inevitable part of life in the market place.
A few timeservers and a few lazy and careless brethren may occasionally slip by and enjoy a few years of comparative leisure at the expense of the taxpayers, but their number is very small. The others are honorable and decent fellows, often of outstanding ability, who happen to prefer a non-competitive existence to one that would undoubtedly offer much greater financial rewards but at the risk of their being obliged to sacrifice part of their personal integrity.
Lakes consisting a large part of the Canal
So much for the men who built the Canal, and now let me give you a few facts for the benefit of those who like a few statistics with their geography.
Most people of course are vaguely familiar with the fact that the Panama Canal is not really a canal in the accepted sense of the word, as a canal or reed or tube through which water can freely pass, as it does through the pipes in the bathroom. It has not even been dug into the soil, as most ordinary canals have been. On the contrary, it has been made to run through the attic, for with the exception of short stretches near the Atlantic and the Pacific, the Panama Canal runs well above sea level and in the region of the Gatun Lake it reaches the respectable height of eighty-five feet.
The famous Culebra Cut (now called the Gaillard Cut in honor of the man responsible for this difficult engineering feat) is forty-five feet deep but its bottom is situated forty feet above sea level. Incidentally, the width of the Canal itself now makes it possible for every ship, with the exception of the Queen Elizabeth, Queen Mary and the Normandie, to sail through this narrow gap. As some 29 000 000 tons are moved through the Canal every year (which is only 7 000 000 less than pass through the Suez Canal) we need not for the moment worry about these three aquatic monsters, who may well have been the last of their kind, for unless all present indications are entirely misleading, the days of the super-super-luxury greyhounds are numbered. They will disappear together with the civilization which mistook quantity for quality and considered the dinosaur as the proudest product of all creation.
The Canal runs through a strip of United States territory which is five miles wide on both sides of the center of the waterway itself, but which fails to include the cities of Panama and Colon, which have remained in the possession of the sovereign republic of Panama ever since Theodore Roosevelt established that puppet state. None of this land can belong to private owners. It is government domain and a silent but highly eloquent argument in favor of government ownership. For nothing strikes the visitor to this part of the world quite as much as the excellent way in which the whole of this region is administered by government officials rather than by private enterprise.
The very air seems filled with a quiet efficiency which extends from the little electric cars, which pull your ship into the locks with a minimum of fuss and a minimum loss of time, to the sanitary measures which make you feel as if every one of the forty thousand people who inhabit this earthly paradise should live to be at least a hundred years old. Yet a great deal of highly technical and intricate engineering work must be done both during the day and during the night to keep the Canal in constant and perfect running order for that endless procession of ships which use this short cut from Europe to Asia and whose owners insist upon speed and accuracy in return for the high tolls they are obliged to pay. For this is no Suez Canal—a wide trough running through a fiat desert where eternal dredging is the only price you have to pay for safety. This third-story canal offers entirely different problems, as I shall try and make clear by drawing you a picture.
Should you enter the Canal from the Atlantic side, you would first of all pass through the Limon Bay, on which the city of Colon is situated. Soon the shores begin to approach each other and you enter a canal which leads you up to the famous Gatun locks. There the interesting part of the voyage begins, for there your ship starts upon its skyward career. By the way, I would like to give all prospective travelers fair warning that unless they most carefully watch every moment of the hoisting operation, they will miss the whole thing, for all the operations necessary to drag your vessel into the locks and to lift it some forty feet up in the air are performed with such skill and ease that you will find yourself peacefully sailing across Gatun Lake while you are still waiting for the show to begin.
Take first of all this matter of going up in your watery elevator. Little electric cars, running on rails parallel with the Canal itself, have quietly pulled the ship into the first lock. At once invisible hands have closed the gates behind you and your vessel begins its upward course. This experience is repeated twice more and before you realize how the thing is done, you are on the top floor, eighty-five feet above sea level.
On the day I passed through the Canal, we were very fortunate in having a perfect day. I can, however, imagine what it must look like when it rains. Soon afterwards I was to learn all about tropical showers, rains, deluges and cloudbursts, but on that particular morning, the sun was shining brightly and I was grateful, for once you have arrived in the actual lake, the scene becomes very depressing. Indeed, you will then begin to understand how Noah must have felt when on the thirty-ninth day of his voyage the earth had practically disappeared from view. On all sides you have evidence of steaming merrily across an inundated wilderness. Here and there the top of a tree, deader than any tree one has ever seen before, sticks out from the surface of the waters, looking like something one remembers from Doré's illustrations of the Deluge. Once upon a time, and not so very long ago either, those trees were enjoying life, liberty and an arboreal pursuit of happiness, fighting no doubt a million plagues and perils but nevertheless deriving considerable contentment from the fact that they existed. And around their bases there clustered the huts of happy little natives, dancing the rumba and the tarantella and the fandango to the merry strumming of their guitars, living on luscious tropical fruit and dying like flies—they, their loving wives and their loving children—dying like flies from every form and variety of preventable disease, from leprosy to psoriasis and from typhoid to phthisis. Nevertheless, like the trees which they were too lazy to cut down, they too were exercising their constitutional rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I add this for the benefit of those sentimental citizens who are always able to weep bitter tears upon the fate of their poor little brown brethren who lived lives of unsoiled innocence until the wicked White Man broke rudely into their beautiful paradise and forced them to wear pants and made them brush their teeth and send their children to the Red Cross to be inoculated against typhoid fever.
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