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 deservedmore. For three years he had endured heat and cold, disappointment, discomfort,danger, and disease, with responsibility almost too heavy for one pair ofshoulders; and day by day, through that time, the great Kashi Bridge over theGanges had grown under his charge. Now, in less than three months, if all wentwell, his Excellency the Viceroy would open the bridge in state, an archbishopwould bless it, and the first trainload of soldiers would come over it, andthere would be speeches.
Findlayson, C. E., sat in his trolley on a construction line that ran along oneof the main revetments—the huge stone-faced banks that flared away northand south for three miles on either side of the river—and permittedhimself to think of the end. With its approaches, his work was one mile andthree-quarters in length; a lattice-girder bridge, trussed with the Findlaysontruss, standing on seven-and-twenty brick piers. Each one of those piers wastwenty-four feet in diameter, capped with red Agra stone and sunk eighty feetbelow the shifting sand of the Ganges’ bed. Above them was a railway-linefifteen feet broad; above that, again, a cart-road of eighteen feet, flankedwith footpaths. At either end rose towers of red brick, loopholed for musketryand pierced for big guns, and the ramp of the road was being pushed forward totheir haunches. The raw earth-ends were crawling and alive with hundreds uponhundreds of tiny asses climbing out of the yawning borrow-pit below withsackfuls of stuff; and the hot afternoon air was filled with the noise ofhooves, the rattle of the drivers’ sticks, and the swish and roll-down ofthe dirt. The river was very low, and on the dazzling white sand between thethree centre piers stood squat cribs of railway-sleepers, filled within anddaubed without with mud, to support the last of the girders as those wereriveted up. In the little deep water left by the drought, an overhead-cranetravelled to and fro along its spile-pier, jerking sections of iron into place,snorting and backing and grunting as an elephant grunts in the timber-yard.Riveters by the hundred swarmed about the lattice side-work and the iron roofof the railway-line, hung from invisible staging under the bellies of th