chocolate-coloured water was her messenger. There was a shriek
above the roar of the water, the complaint of the spans coming down
on their blocks as the cribs were whirled out from under their
bellies. The stone-boats groaned and ground each other in the eddy
that swung round the abutment, and their clumsy masts rose higher
and higher against the dim sky-line.

"Before she was shut between these walls we knew what she would do.
Now she is thus cramped God only knows what she will do!" said Peroo,
watching the furious turmoil round the guard-tower. "Ohe! Fight,
then! Fight hard, for it is thus that a woman wears herself out."

But Mother Gunga would not fight as Peroo desired. After the first
down-stream plunge there came no more walls of water, but the river
lifted herself bodily, as a snake when she drinks in midsummer,
plucking and fingering along the revetments, and banking up behind
the piers till even Findlayson began to recalculate the strength of
his work.

When day came the village gasped. "Only last night," men said,
turning to each other," it was as a town in the river-bed! Look
now!"

And they looked and wondered afresh at the deep water, the racing
water that licked the throat of the piers. The farther bank was
veiled by rain, into which the bridge ran out and vanished; the
spurs up-stream were marked by no more than eddies and spoutings,
and down-stream the pent river, once freed of her guide-lines, had
spread like a sea to the horizon. Then hurried by, rolling in the
water, dead men and oxen together, with here and there a patch of