Rudyard Kipling

The Day's Work Rudyard Kipling

Findlayson, C. E., sat in his trolley on a construction line that ran along one of the main revetments-the huge stone-faced banks that flared away north and south for three miles on either side of the river-and permitted himself to think of the end. With its approaches, his work was one mile and three-quarters fin length; a lattice-girder bridge, trussed with the Findlayson truss, standing on seven-and-twenty brick pies. 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. Above them was a railway-line fifteen feet broad; above that, again, a cart-road of eighteen feet, flanked with footpaths. At either end rose towers of red brick, loopholed for musketry and pierced for big guns, and the ramp of the road was being pushed forward to their haunches. The raw earth-ends were crawling and alive with hundreds upon hundreds of tiny asses climbing out of the yawning borrow- pit below with sackfuls of stuff; and the hot afternoon air was filled with the noise of hooves,