Page:The National geographic magazine, volume 1.djvu/406

 stakes every hundred feet, and the leveller follows putting in elevations and cross sections. In this way the work goes on from early morning until nearly dark, stopping about an hour for lunch.

After the day's work comes the dinner, the table graced with wild hog, or turkey, or venison, or all. After dinner the smoke, then the day's notes are worked up and duplicated and all hands get into their nets. For a moment the countless nocturnal noises of the great forest, enlivened perhaps by the scream of a tiger, or the deep, muffled roar of a puma, fall upon drowsy ears, then follows the sleep that always accompanies hard work and good health, till the bull-voiced howling monkeys set the forest echoing with their announcement of the breaking dawn.

In reconnoissance and preliminary work the experienced engineer, is able, in many cases, to avoid obstacles without vitiating the results of his work, but in the final location, in staking out absolute curves and driving tangents thousands of feet long across country, no dodging is possible.

On the hills and elevated ground the engineer can, comparatively speaking, get along quite comfortably, his principal annoyances being the uneven character of the ground, which compels him to set his instrument very frequently, and the necessity of felling some gigantic tree every now and then.

In the valleys and lowlands there is an unceasing round of obstacles. The line may run for some distance over level ground covered with a comparatively open growth, then without warning it encounters the wreck of a fallen tree, and hours are consumed hewing a passage through the mass of broken limbs and shattered trunk, all matted and bound together with vines and shrubbery. A little farther on a stream is crossed, and the line may cross and recross four or five times in the next thousand feet. The engineer must either climb down the steep banks, for the streams burrow deep in the stiff clay of these valleys, ford the stream and climb the opposite bank, or he must fall a tree from bank to bank and cross on its slippery trunk twenty or twenty-five feet above the water.

Either on the immediate bank or in its vicinity is almost certain to be encountered a "saccate" clearing. This may be only one or two hundred feet across or it may be a half a mile. In the former case the "saccate" grass will be ten or fifteen feet in height and so matted and interwoven with vines and briars