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Updated: May 16, 2025
Findlayson, this is two months before anything could have been expected, and the left bank is littered up with stuff still. Two full months before the time!" "That's why it comes. I've only known Indian rivers for five-and-twenty years, and I don't pretend to understand. Here comes another tar." Findlayson opened the telegram. "Cockran, this time, from the Ganges Canal: 'Heavy rains here.
Hitchcock felt very old in the crowded experiences of the past three years, that had taught him power and responsibility. "You were rather a colt," said Findlayson. "I wonder how you'll like going back to office-work when this job's over." "I shall hate it!" said the young man, and as he went on his eye followed Findlayson's, and he muttered, "Isn't it damned good?"
"This is some island of last year's indigo-crop," he went on. "We shall find no men here; but have great care, Sahib; all the snakes of a hundred miles have been flooded out. Here comes the lightning, on the heels of the wind. Now we shall be able to look; but walk carefully." Findlayson was far and far beyond any fear of snakes, or indeed any merely human emotion.
Foreman after foreman shouted to Findlayson, who had posted himself by the guard-tower, that his section of the river-bed had been cleaned out, and when the last voice dropped Findlayson hurried over the bridge till the iron plating of the permanent way gave place to the temporary plank-walk over the three centre piers, and there he met Hitchcock. "All clear your side?" said Findlayson.
Then Peroo was at his elbow, shouting that a wire hawser had snapped and the stone-boats were loose. Findlayson saw the fleet open and swing out fanwise to a long-drawn shriek of wire straining across gunnels. "A tree hit them. They will all go," cried Peroo. "The main hawser has parted. What does the Sahib do?" An immensely complex plan had suddenly flashed into Findlayson's mind.
The whisper rang in the box of latticework. "Yes, and the east channel's filling now. We're utterly out of our reckoning. When is this thing down on us?" "There's no saying. She's filling as fast as she can. Look!" Findlayson pointed to the planks below his feet, where the sand, burned and defiled by months of work, was beginning to whisper and fizz. "What orders?" said Hitchcock.
The river and the island lay in full daylight now, and there was never mark of hoof or pug on the wet earth under the peepul. Only a parrot screamed in the branches, bringing down showers of water-drops as he fluttered his wings. "Up! We are cramped with cold! Has the opium died out? Canst thou move, Sahib?" Findlayson staggered to his feet and shook himself.
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.
A warm drowsiness crept over Findlayson, the Chief Engineer, whose duty was with his bridge. The heavy raindrops struck him with a thousand tingling little thrills, and the weight of all time since time was made hung heavy on his eyelids.
They had been tried many times in sudden crises by slipping of booms, by breaking of tackle, failure of cranes, and the wrath of the river but no stress had brought to light any man among men whom Findlayson and Hitchcock would have honoured by working as remorselessly as they worked them-selves.
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