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In these early reports made in 1836 and 1837, we find elaborate discussions as to the power of the locomotive engine, and a recognition of the fact that in comparing different lines we must regard the plan as well as the profile, "as the resistance from curves on a level road may even exceed that produced by gravity on an incline;" and in one place we find the ascents "equated at 18 feet, the slope which requires double the power needed on a level road," resulting in a "virtual increase."
These laurels were dyed in blood, but the maker of a good road is a solid benefactor of all posterity. In time this road came to an end, and thenceforth it would be incorrect to say that the roads were bad, for, to tell the truth, there were no roads at all. There were steep ascents and violent descents, but no traces of carriage wheels, and so it is throughout the whole of Old Castile.
When he waited on them at supper their talk was of the easier ascents in Switzerland, and in the mountains of his own land, whose names rang like music in his ears the Striding Edge, the Great Gable Needle, and Saddleback Crags.
In this state they were hardly of any use among the steep ascents of the portages, when we were obliged to drag the sledges ourselves. We found a few of the rapids entirely frozen.
It has got up full speed by this time. About one mile a minute sixty miles an hour! Sometimes it goes a little faster, sometimes a little slower, according to the nature of the ground; for a railway is by no means a level-way, the ascents and descents being occasionally very steep. Those who travel in the carriages form but a faint conception of the pace.
Through gloomy vaults where the light of day had never shone, past hideous doors of dark dens and cages, down cavernous flights of steps, and again up steep rugged ascents of stone and brick, more like dry waterfalls than staircases, Defarge, the turnkey, and Jacques Three, linked hand and arm, went with all the speed they could make.
Sharp, rocky eminences began to rise around them, and, in a short time, deep declivities and ascents, both formidable in height and difficult from the narrowness of the path, offered to the travellers obstacles of a different kind from those with which they had recently contended.
The halls were long and dark and dusty, and because the building had been put up under contract at a period when public contract-work was not so scrupulously honest as it notably is in our present cleanly muck-raked era, the steps of the badly built staircase creaked and groaned and sagged and gave forth clouds of dust under the weight of the myriads of little feet which climbed up and clown those steep ascents every day.
It is only necessary to point out at this stage that instruments which lack due sensibility will unavoidably read too high in ascents, and too low in descents where, according to the general law, the air is found to grow constantly colder with elevation above the earth's surface.
From the Chu valley, dotted here and there with Kirghiz tent villages and their grazing flocks and herds, we pushed our wheels up the broken path, which wound like a mythical stairway far up into the low-hanging clouds. We trudged up one of the steepest ascents we have ever made with a wheel. The scenery was grand, but lonely.
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