“These men said that where they had been working the sun never shone, for his light was stopped on the unbroken green which, except where the big rivers flowed, roofed the whole land.” Nicknamed “Mad Maria” by the engineers who designed it, the railroad took five years to finish, and by the time it was ready in 1912, the South American rubber trade had gone bust, and the estimated six thousand men who had died of disease and starvation trying to build it had lost their lives for nothing.
