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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.
Findlayson, C. E., turned on his trolley and looked over the
face of the country that he had changed for seven miles around.
Looked back on the humming village of five thousand work-men; up
stream and down, along the vista of spurs and sand; across the
river to the far piers, lessening in the haze; overhead to the
guard-towers -and only he knew how strong those were - and with a
sigh of contentment saw that his work was good. There stood his
bridge before him in the sunlight, lacking only a few weeks' work
on the girders of the three middle piers - his bridge, raw and
ugly as original sin, but pukka - permanent - to endure when all
memory of the builder, yea, even of the splendid Findlayson
truss, has perished. Practically, the thing was done.
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