The Bridge-Builders | Page 3

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This Project Gutenberg Etext prepared by Bill Stoddard
[email protected]

The Bridge-Builders
by Ridyard 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