Still, the simple fact that it was built remains the overriding wonder, given the astonishing difficulties that had to be overcome and the means at hand in the 1850s. Present-day engineers who have had experience in jungle construction wonder how in the world it was ever managed.

Stephens was the president of the railroad, which was a wholly American-owned stock company with its main office in the old Tontine Building on Wall Street. The capitalization was a million dollars.

From Chimborazo the party pushed farther south, into the valley of the upper Amazon. Then they were climbing again into the rarefied air of the Andes, traveling now, on occasion, along the “wonderful remains of the Inca Roads” and taking, as it happens, about the same route as the present-day Pan-American Highway. The Inca Road and the thought of

Any city that has the Library of Congress is my capital. Some of the best, most productive days of my life have been spent in its manuscript collection or working with its newspaper files. It is one of the wonders of the world. The statistics are staggering—twenty million books, of which less than a fourth are in English, nearly six million pieces

More than $500 million in gold went across the Panama Railroad in this same ten-year period; more than $140 million in silver, $5 million in jewelry, and $19 million in paper money. And the company collected a quarter of one percent of the value of all precious cargo.

The following spring they sailed for the coast of present-day Colombia, to the mouth of the Magdalena, by which, for the next fifty-odd days, they headed south again, deep inland for hundreds of miles against the current, as far as an outpost called Honda. Before them stood the cordillera of the Andes. They left the river and went overland to

After nearly five years he had returned from one of the great scientific odysseys of all time. It was a journey that would capture the imagination of the age, but that has been strangely forgotten in our own time.

awesome vision of an ancient age of ice.

In the company of a young French medical doctor turned botanist, Aime Bonpland, Humboldt had departed from La Coruña, Spain, in June 1799, on a Spanish frigate, slipping past a British blockade in the dark of night, in the midst of a storm, and carrying with him a unique document from the Spanish government. He and Bonpland had been granted