-an exact meter in

the jungle away to build this metropolis of the tropics.

The ocean-going steamers, drawing more than twenty feet of water, steam up from the sea, one thousand eight hundred miles distant. They are stopped there by the Santo Antonio Falls. railroad runs from Porto Velho to Villa Bella along the Rio Madeira and thence to Villa Church along the Mamoré. It

The

and along the BrazilianBolivian frontiers. But, it cost, according to the engineers, upwards of $25,000,000. Ordinary railway construction with equipment and rolling stock costs about $20,000 per mile. A mile cost of $40,000 is reckoned as prohibitive for any line. The MadeiraMamoré cost, approximately, $150,000 per mile.

A generation ago Brazil and Bolivia

began one of those seemingly interminable boundary disputes peculiar to LatinAmerican nations. Both claimed the Acré district watered by the Rio Mutumparana, the Madeira, and the Mamoré, a section larger than the State of Texas and fabulously valuable because of the rubber forests. The Hague Tribunal finally awarded the land to Brazil on condition that the Brazilians construct a railway from the headwaters of navigation up through the rubber groves. Brazil began looking around for a builder.

Capitalists of various nations tried and failed. The Brazilians did no better

themselves. In the end Percival Farquhar of York, Pennsylvania, financed the undertaking. He was secured by special bonds issued by Brazil and is said to have received twelve and one-half per cent of the gross cost of the work as his profit. The construction work was in charge of John Randolph. Work began about five years ago. The road is now virtually completed and is being operated for Brazil.

Labor was the heaviest item of expense in the construction. It is easy to see the reason for this. Every cubic yard of dirt was moved by hand. Not one steam shovel, not even a wheel scraper

was used. From terminal to
terminal, the fills, cuts, and
embankments along the road
were made with picks, wheel-
barrows, and No. 2 shovels.
Hand labor ran the cost into
amazing figures. For this work
Barbadian negroes, Jamaicans,
Brazilian half-castes, with the
mongrel mestizos and quadroons
picked up along the Caribbean, were
the sole dependence.

The devils of jungle heat literally ate the men's lives. Beri-beri and blackwater fever packed the slatted-canvas company hospitals at Porto Velho with dying black men. White men devoured quinine to ward off jungle fevers, but the death rate among them was high in spite of all precautions.

Men who worked on this railway claim that region is the white man's grave of the New World. The sunsets in the Madeira Valley are splendors of red light, but the mercury rises day after day to one hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit. The heat is so great that the tender creepers and the young shoots of the zapote trees wither. Then sud

THE ONLY ROCK CUT ON THE RAILWAY RUNS THROUGH FINE GRANITE

The road is of narrow gauge, being a meter in width.

denly the mercury falls straight down to forty degrees and the road builders. shiver in the icy blasts from the Andean peaks.

Some morning a man notices a slight swelling in his legs. He attributes it to heat or insect stings. In a day or two the flesh begins to "pit" under finger pressure. His body begins to swell. He has beri-beri. If he makes all haste out of the jungle, catches a steamer downstream, he may, or he may not, live. If he stays in the jungle, he surely dies. If he can reach salt air alive, the swell

ing disappears, though in tardy fashion.

There came a time when the blacks and mixed breeds were dying so rapidly that further labor recruiting was necessary. It was decided to bring in white men. Aided by a well-meaning German. consul, a labor agent hurried to Europe In Danzig, Stettin, Königsberg, and

other Baltic seaports, big dock-wallopers, drinkers of beer, drinkers of beer, gigantic men of the Teutonic type, were gathered and sent down into the green furnace of the Amazon Valley. These beer-drinkers, accustomed to the cool, salt fogs of the Baltic, withtropics. Six

ered in the hundred of

them landed at Porto Velho and

the jungle took them.

Only seventy-five of them went back down the Amazon. Porto Velho will not soon forget the manner of death of those other five hundred odd. Beri-beri stole out of the jungle and slew them. by the score. No man in Porto Velho slept while the Germans were fighting the disease through blazing heat and under the big stars that burn in the velvety blackness of the tropical nights. Their death cries echoed through the walls of the makeshift hospitals in the little picket post of civilization.

But beri-beri did not get all of those who died. Black-water fever-a malignant form of malaria that attacks the kidneys-claimed many. Fifty of these big, blonde Teutons were seized with madness and walked into the dense forests with the insane intent of finding their way to salt water. They were swallowed up in the green hell of the jungle and no word of them ever came back. The rest of the five hundred sleep three in a grave around the hospital at Candelaria, just at the edge of Porto Velho.

This terrible harvest of death in the ranks of the laborers made it cheaper to bring timber from the United States for bridges than to detail men from the con

struction gangs to fell trees along the

right of way. With a whole. continent of tie timber on either side, practically all the railroad ties were brought from Japan-over from Formosa-across the Pacific, around the Horn and up the east coast of South America, and then two thousand miles up the Amazon. Ninety per cent of the ties came from the pricecutting timber merchants of Yokohama. The rest were mahogany and ebony trees hewed down from the right of way. Steel from Pittsburgh iron furnaces, bridge timbers of Georgia yellow pine, and all the lumber used in the building of Porto Velho came from the docks of New York, Philadelphia, and Mobile.

Horses died in a few weeks after being landed in the valley. Missouri and Arkansas mules perished in the heat. Oxen brought in from the United States were the only beasts of burden able to endure the climate. They were used in "snaking" timber out of the jungle.

Beset by the devil of unrest, that must drive them on and on to tasks in equally remote lands, the men who built the "Estro Ferro Madeira-Mamoré" left the jungle as soon as the last steel rail was laid. Now that the road is built, the rubber of the Acré district is expected to find its way to the world's markets down the Amazon.