THE BRIDGE-BUILDERS


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