Publisher's Synopsis
Findlayson, C. E., sat in his trolley on a construction line that ran along one of themain revetments-the huge stone-faced banks that flared away north and south forthree miles on either side of the river and permitted himself to think of the end. Withits approaches, his work was one mile and three-quarters in length; a lattice-girderbridge, 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 stoneand sunk eighty feet below the shifting sand of the Ganges' bed. Above them was arailway-line fifteen feet broad; above that, again, a cart-road of eighteen feet, flankedwith footpaths. At either end rose towers, of red brick, loopholed for musketry andpierced for big guns, and the ramp of the road was being pushed forward to theirhaunches. The raw earth-ends were crawling and alive with hundreds upon hundredsof tiny asses climbing out of the yawning borrow-pit below with sackfuls of stuff; andthe 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 thedazzling white sand between the three centre piers stood squat cribs of railwaysleepers, filled within and daubed without with mud, to support the last of the girdersas those were riveted up. In the little deep water left by the drought, an overheadcrane 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 bythe hundred swarmed about the lattice side-work and the iron roof of the railway linehung from invisible staging under the bellies of the girders, clustered round thethroats of the piers, and rode on the overhang of the footpath-stanchions; their firepots and the spurts of flame that answered each hammer-stroke showing no morethan pale yellow in the sun's glare. East and west and north and south theconstruction-trains rattled and shrieked up and down the embankments, the piledtrucks of brown and white stone banging behind them till the side-boards wereunpinned, and with a roar and a grumble a few thousand tons' more material wereflung out to hold the river in plac