by Rudyard Kipling
The least that Findlayson, of the Public Works Department,
expected was a C.I.E.; he dreamed of a C.S.I.
Indeed, his friends told him that he deserved more.
For three years he had endured heat and cold, disappointment,
discomfort, danger, and disease, with responsibility
almost to top-heavy for one pair of shoulders; and
day by day, through that time, the great Kashi Bridge
over the Ganges had grown under his charge. Now,
in less than three months, if all went well, his Excellency
the Viceroy would open the bridge in state, an archbishop
would bless it, and the first trainload of soldiers
would come over it, and there would be speeches.
Findlayson, C. E., sat in his trolley on a construction
line that ran along one of the main revetments—the
huge stone-faced banks that flared away north and
south for three miles on either side of the river and
permitted himself to think of the end. With its
approaches, his work was one mile and three-quarters
in length; a lattice-girder bridge, trussed with the
Findlayson truss standing on seven-and-twenty brick
piers. Each one of those piers was twenty-four
feet in diameter, capped with red Agra stone and sunk
eighty feet below the shifting sand of the Ganges’
bed. Above them was a railway-line fifteen feet
broad; above that, again, a cart-road of eighteen
feet, flanked with footpaths. At either end rose
towers, of red brick, loopholed for musketry and pierced
for big guns, and the ramp of the road was being pushed
forward to their haunches. The raw earth-ends
were crawling and alive with hundreds upon hundreds
of tiny asses climbing out of the yawning borrow-pit
below with sackfuls of stuff; and the hot afternoon
air was filled with the noise of hooves, the rattle
of the drivers’ sticks, and the swish and roll-down
of the dirt. The river was very low, and on the
dazzling white sand between the three centre piers
stood squat cribs of railway-sleepers, filled within
and daubed without with mud, to support the last of
the girders as those were riveted up. In the little
deep water left by the drought, an overhead crane
travelled to and fro along its spile-pier, jerking
sections of iron into place, snorting and backing
and grunting as an elephant grunts in the timberyard.
Riveters by the hundred swarmed about the lattice
side-work and the iron roof of the railway line hung
from invisible staging under the bellies of the girders,
clustered round the throats of the piers, and rode
on the overhang of the footpath-stanchions; their
fire-pots and the spurts of flame that answered each
hammer-stroke showing no more than pale yellow in
the sun’s glare. East and west and north
and south the construction-trains rattled and shrieked
up and down the embankments, the piled trucks of brown
and white stone banging behind them till the side-boards
were unpinned, and with a roar and a grumble a few
thousand tons’ more material were flung out
to hold the river in place.
