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Updated: June 17, 2025
Little did he know the resource and capacity of our Indian sappers and miners, our Engineer and Pioneer battalions. They threw themselves on broken culverts and wrecked bridges; with only hand tools, so short of equipment were they, they drove piles and built up girders on heaps of sleepers and made the bridges safe again.
Smoky lanterns and pine fagots, dipped in tallow and stuck in iron clamps, shed a fitful light from rafters that girded ceiling and walls. On the floor of flagstones lay enormous skins of the chase polar bear, Arctic wolf, and grizzly. Heads of musk-ox, caribou, and deer decorated the great timber girders.
The excavation of the sides of the avenue having been completed, and six rows of permanent viaduct girders erected on both sides, timber bents, as shown on Figs. 2, 4, 5, and 6, were erected on this steel to support the ends of the girders "C" and carry the structure while the rock core was being excavated.
The great bells, each of which is as large as the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, that for hundreds of years for Rheims have sounded the angelus, were torn from their oak girders and melted into black masses of silver and copper, without shape and without sound. Never have I looked upon a picture of such pathos, of such wanton and wicked destruction.
It has twelve wall and eight interior columns connected at every fourth floor by diagonal braces; these columns carry 1,800 pounds to the linear foot. The wind pressure calculated at the rate of 30 lbs. to the square foot is enormous and is provided for by deep wall girders and knee braces which transfer the strain to the columns and to the foundation.
There stood his bridge before him in the sunlight, lacking only a few weeks' work on the girders of the three middle piers his bridge, raw and ugly as original sin, but pukka permanent to endure when all memory of the builder, yea, even of the splendid Findlayson truss, has perished. Practically, the thing was done.
He had hardly got past the fountain presented by Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy in wasted benevolence, than he heard the deafening report of the bomb which had wrecked his studio, reduced it to a tangle of iron girders and stanchions, strewn its floor with brick rubble and thick dust, and left his wife a human wreck, lying unconscious with a broken spine, surrounded by splinters of glass, broken jars, porcelain trays, and nasty-looking fragments of sponge and vertebrate anatomy.
Light girders, stems and threads of gold, burst from the pillars like fountains, streamed like an Aurora across the roof and interlaced, like like conjuring tricks. All about the great circle for the dancers there were beautiful figures, strange dragons, and intricate and wonderful grotesques bearing lights. The place was inundated with artificial light that shamed the newborn day.
The central span of the viaduct is an arch of 220 ft. span between abutments, and about 90 ft. height; the remainder of the space on each side is divided into two spans by an iron pier at a distance of 68 ft. from the retaining wall. These piers are 36 ft. 2 in. high, and carry girders 144 ft. long, balanced each on a pivot in the center.
In daylight they are merely ugly, but at night, with tongues of flame, they speak of the potency of labour. I can still see that strange silhouette of steel cylinders and connecting girders against a blue-black sky, with silent masses of flame leaping into the heavens.
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