The Bridge Builders

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THE BRIDGE-BUILDERS


by Rudyard Kipling




The least that Findlayson, of the Public Works Department, expected was
a C.I.E.; he dreamed of a C.S.I. Indeed, his friends told him that
he deserved more. For three years he had endured heat and cold,
disappointment, discomfort, danger, and disease, with responsibility
almost to top-heavy for one pair of shoulders; and day by day, through
that time, the great Kashi Bridge over the Ganges had grown under his
charge. Now, in less than three months, if all went well, his Excellency
the Viceroy would open the bridge in state, an archbishop would bless
it, and the first trainload of soldiers would come over it, and there
would be speeches.

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 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. 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, the rattle of the drivers' sticks, and the swish and
roll-down of the dirt. The river was very low, and on the dazzling
white sand between the three centre piers stood squat cribs of
railway-sleepers, filled within and daubed without with mud, to support
the last of the girders as those were riveted up. In the little deep
water left by the drought, an overhead crane 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
by the hundred swarmed about the lattice side-work and the iron roof of
the railway line hung from invisible staging under the bellies of the
girders, clustered round the throats of the piers, and rode on the
overhang of the footpath-stanchions; their fire-pots and the spurts of
flame that answered each hammer-stroke showing no more than pale
yellow in the sun's glare. East and west and north and south the
construction-trains rattled and shrieked up and down the embankments,
the piled trucks of brown and white stone banging behind them till the
side-boards were unpinned, and with a roar and a grumble a few thousand
tons' more material were flung out to hold the river in place.

Findlayson, C. E., turned on his trolley and looked over the face of the
country that he had changed for seven miles around. Looked back on the
humming village of five thousand work-men; up stream and down, along the
vista of spurs and sand; across the river to the far piers, lessening
in the haze; overhead to the guard-towers--and only he knew how strong
those were--and with a sigh of contentment saw that his work was good.
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.

Hitchcock, his assistant, cantered along the line on a little
switch-tailed Kabuli pony who through long practice could have trotted
securely over trestle, and nodded to his chief.

"All but," said he, with a smile.

"I've been thinking about it," the senior answered. "Not half a bad job
for two men, is it?"

"One--and a half. 'Gad, what a Cooper's Hill cub I was when I came on
the works!" 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?"

"I think we'll go up the service together," Findlayson said to himself.
"You're too good a youngster to waste on another man. Cub thou wast;
assistant thou art. Personal assistant, and at Simla, thou shalt be, if
any credit comes to me out of the business!"

Indeed, the burden of the work had fallen altogether on Findlayson and
his assistant, the young man whom he had chosen because of his rawness
to break to his own needs. There were labour contractors by the
half-hundred--fitters and riveters, European, borrowed from the railway
workshops, with, perhaps, twenty white and half-caste subordinates to
direct, under direction, the bevies of workmen--but none knew better
than these two, who trusted each other, how the underlings were not to
be trusted. 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. Findlayson thought it over from the
beginning: the months of office-work destroyed at a blow when the
Government of India, at the last moment, added two feet to the width of
the bridge, under the impression that bridges were cut out of paper, and
so brought to ruin at least half an acre of calculations--and Hitchcock,
new to disappointment, buried his head in his arms and wept; the
heart-breaking delays over the filling of the contracts in England; the
futile correspondences hinting at great wealth of commissions if one,
only one, rather doubtful consignment were passed; the war that followed
the refusal; the careful, polite obstruction at the other end that
followed the war, till young Hitchcock, putting one month's leave to
another month, and borrowing ten days from Findlayson, spent his poor
little savings of a year in a wild dash to London, and there, as his own
tongue asserted and the later consignments proved, put the fear of God
into a man so great that he feared only Parliament and said so till
Hitchcock wrought with him across his own dinner table, and--he feared
the Kashi Bridge and all who spoke in its name. Then there was the
cholera that came in the night to the village by the bridge works; and
after the cholera smote the small-pox. The fever they had always with
them. Hitchcock had been appointed a magistrate of the third class
with whipping powers, for the better government of the community, and
Findlayson watched him wield his powers temperately, learning what to
overlook and what to look after. It was a long, long reverie, and it
covered storm, sudden freshets, death in every manner and shape, violent
and awful rage against red tape half frenzying a mind that knows it
should be busy on other things; drought, sanitation, finance; birth,
wedding, burial, and riot in the village of twenty warring castes;
argument, expostulation, persuasion, and the blank despair that a
man goes to bed upon, thankful that his rifle is all in pieces in
the gun-case. Behind everything rose the black frame of the Kashi
Bridge--plate by plate, girder by girder, span by span--and each pier
of it recalled Hitchcock, the all-round man, who had stood by his chief
without failing from the very first to this last.

So the bridge was two men's work--unless one counted Peroo, as Peroo
certainly counted himself. He was a Lascar, a Kharva from Bulsar,
familiar with every port between Rockhampton and London, who had risen
to the rank of serang on the British India boats, but wearying of
routine musters and clean clothes, had thrown up the service and gone
inland, where men of his calibre were sure of employment. For his
knowledge of tackle and the handling of heavy weights, Peroo was worth
almost any price he might have chosen to put upon his services; but
custom decreed the wage of the overhead-men, and Peroo was not within
many silver pieces of his proper value. Neither running water nor
extreme heights made him afraid; and, as an ex-serang, he knew how to
hold authority. No piece of iron was so big or so badly placed that
Peroo could not devise a tackle to lift it--a loose-ended, sagging
arrangement, rigged with a scandalous amount of talking, but perfectly
equal to the work in hand. It was Peroo who had saved the girder of
Number Seven pier from destruction when the new wire-rope jammed in the
eye of the crane, and the huge plate tilted in its slings, threatening
to slide out sideways. Then the native workmen lost their heads with
great shoutings, and Hitchcock's right arm was broken by a falling
T-plate, and he buttoned it up in his coat and swooned, and came to and
directed for four hours till Peroo, from the top of the crane, reported
"All's well," and the plate swung home. There was no one like Peroo,
serang, to lash, and guy, and hold, to control the donkey-engines, to
hoist a fallen locomotive craftily out of the borrow-pit into which it
had tumbled; to strip, and dive, if need be, to see how the concrete
blocks round the piers stood the scouring of Mother Gunga, or to
adventure upstream on a monsoon night and report on the state of the
embankment-facings. He would interrupt the field-councils of Findlayson
and Hitchcock without fear, till his wonderful English, or his still
more wonderful linguafranca, half Portuguese and half Malay, ran out and
he was forced to take string and show the knots that he would recommend.
He controlled his own gang of tackle men--mysterious relatives from
Kutch Mandvi gathered month by month and tried to the uttermost. No
consideration of family or kin allowed Peroo to keep weak hands or a
giddy head on the pay-roll. "My honour is the honour of this bridge," he
would say to the about-to-be-dismissed. "What do I care for your honour?
Go and work on a steamer. That is all you are fit for."

The little cluster of huts where he and his gang lived centred round the
tattered dwelling of a sea-priest--one who had never set foot on black
water, but had been chosen as ghostly counsellor by two generations of
sea-rovers all unaffected by port missions or those creeds which are
thrust upon sailors by agencies along Thames bank. The priest of the
Lascars had nothing to do with their caste, or indeed with anything at
all. He ate the offerings of his church, and slept and smoked, and slept
again, "for," said Peroo, who had haled him a thousand miles inland, "he
is a very holy man. He never cares what you eat so long as you do
not eat beef, and that is good, because on land we worship Shiva, we
Kharvas; but at sea on the Kumpani's boats we attend strictly to the
orders of the Burra Malum [the first mate], and on this bridge we
observe what Finlinson Sahib says."

Finlinson Sahib had that day given orders to clear the scaffolding from
the guard-tower on the right bank, and Peroo with his mates was casting
loose and lowering down the bamboo poles and planks as swiftly as ever
they had whipped the cargo out of a coaster.

From his trolley he could hear the whistle of the serang's silver pipe
and the creek and clatter of the pulleys. Peroo was standing on the
top-most coping of the tower, clad in the blue dungaree of his abandoned
service, and as Findlayson motioned to him to be careful, for his was
no life to throw away, he gripped the last pole, and, shading his eyes
ship-fashion, answered with the long-drawn wail of the fo'c'sle lookout:
"Ham dekhta hai" ("I am looking out").

Findlayson laughed and then sighed. It was years since he had seen
a steamer, and he was sick for home. As his trolley passed under the
tower, Peroo descended by a rope, ape-fashion, and cried: "It looks well
now, Sahib. Our bridge is all but done. What think you Mother Gunga will
say when the rail runs over?"

"She has said little so far. It was never Mother Gunga that delayed us."

"There is always time for her; and none the less there has been delay.
Has the Sahib forgotten last autumn's flood, when the stone-boats were
sunk without warning--or only a half-day's warning?"

"Yes, but nothing save a big flood could hurt us now. The spurs are
holding well on the West Bank."

"Mother Gunga eats great allowances. There is always room for more
stone on the revetments. I tell this to the Chota Sahib,"--he meant
Hitchcock--"and he laughs."

"No matter, Peroo. Another year thou wilt be able to build a bridge in
thine own fashion."

The Lascar grinned. "Then it will not be in this way--with stonework
sunk under water, as the Qyetta was sunk. I like sus-sus-pen-sheen
bridges that fly from bank to bank with one big step, like a
gang-plank. Then no water can hurt. When does the Lord Sahib come to
open the bridge?"

"In three months, when the weather is cooler."

"Ho! ho! He is like the Burra Malum. He sleeps below while the work is
being done. Then he comes upon the quarter-deck and touches with his
finger, and says: 'This is not clean! Dam jibboonwallah!'"

"But the Lord Sahib does not call me a dam jibboonwallah, Peroo."

"No, Sahib; but he does not come on deck till the work is all finished.
Even the Burra Malum of the Nerbudda said once at Tuticorin--"

"Bah! Go! I am busy."

"I, also!" said Peroo, with an unshaken countenance. "May I take the
light dinghy now and row along the spurs?"

"To hold them with thy hands? They are, I think, sufficiently heavy."

"Nay, Sahib. It is thus. At sea, on the Black Water, we have room to be
blown up and down without care. Here we have no room at all. Look you,
we have put the river into a dock, and run her between stone sills."

Findlayson smiled at the "we."

"We have bitted and bridled her. She is not like the sea, that can beat
against a soft beach. She is Mother Gunga--in irons." His voice fell a
little.

"Peroo, thou hast been up and down the world more even than I. Speak
true talk, now. How much dost thou in thy heart believe of Mother
Gunga?"

"All that our priest says. London is London, Sahib. Sydney is Sydney,
and Port Darwin is Port Darwin. Also Mother Gunga is Mother Gunga, and
when I come back to her banks I know this and worship. In London I did
poojah to the big temple by the river for the sake of the God within.
. . . Yes, I will not take the cushions in the dinghy."

Findlayson mounted his horse and trotted to the shed of a bungalow that
he shared with his assistant. The place had become home to him in the
last three years. He had grilled in the heat, sweated in the rains, and
shivered with fever under the rude thatch roof; the lime-wash beside the
door was covered with rough drawings and formulae, and the sentry-path
trodden in the matting of the verandah showed where he had walked alone.
There is no eight-hour limit to an engineer's work, and the evening
meal with Hitchcock was eaten booted and spurred: over their cigars
they listened to the hum of the village as the gangs came up from the
river-bed and the lights began to twinkle.

"Peroo has gone up the spurs in your dinghy. He's taken a couple of
nephews with him, and he's lolling in the stern like a commodore," said
Hitchcock.

"That's all right. He's got something on his mind. You'd think that ten
years in the British India boats would have knocked most of his religion
out of him."

"So it has," said Hitchcock, chuckling. "I overheard him the other
day in the middle of a most atheistical talk with that fat old guru of
theirs. Peroo denied the efficacy of prayer; and wanted the guru to
go to sea and watch a gale out with him, and see if he could stop a
monsoon."

"All the same, if you carried off his guru he'd leave us like a shot. He
was yarning away to me about praying to the dome of St. Paul's when he
was in London."

"He told me that the first time he went into the engine-room of a
steamer, when he was a boy, he prayed to the low-pressure cylinder."

"Not half a bad thing to pray to, either. He's propitiating his own Gods
now, and he wants to know what Mother Gunga will think of a bridge
being run across her. Who's there?" A shadow darkened the doorway, and a
telegram was put into Hitchcock's hand.

"She ought to be pretty well used to it by this time. Only a tar. It
ought to be Ralli's answer about the new rivets. . . . Great Heavens!"
Hitchcock jumped to his feet.

"What is it?" said the senior, and took the form. "That's what Mother
Gunga thinks, is it," he said, reading. "Keep cool, young 'un. We've
got all our work cut out for us. Let's see. Muir wired half an hour ago:
'Floods on the Ramgunga. Look out.' Well, that gives us--one, two--nine
and a half for the flood to reach Melipur Ghaut and seven's sixteen and
a half to Lataoli--say fifteen hours before it comes down to us."

"Curse that hill-fed sewer of a Ramgunga! 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. Bad.' He might have saved the last word. Well,
we don't want to know any more. We've got to work the gangs all night
and clean up the riverbed. You'll take the east bank and work out to
meet me in the middle. Get everything that floats below the bridge: we
shall have quite enough river-craft coming down adrift anyhow, without
letting the stone-boats ram the piers. What have you got on the east
bank that needs looking after?

"Pontoon--one big pontoon with the overhead crane on it. T'other
overhead crane on the mended pontoon, with the cart-road rivets
from Twenty to Twenty-three piers--two construction lines, and a
turning-spur. The pilework must take its chance," said Hitchcock.

"All right. Roll up everything you can lay hands on. We'll give the gang
fifteen minutes more to eat their grub."

Close to the verandah stood a big night-gong, never used except for
flood, or fire in the village. Hitchcock had called for a fresh
horse, and was off to his side of the bridge when Findlayson took the
cloth-bound stick and smote with the rubbing stroke that brings out the
full thunder of the metal.

Long before the last rumble ceased every night-gong in the village
had taken up the warning. To these were added the hoarse screaming of
conches in the little temples; the throbbing of drums and tom-toms; and,
from the European quarters, where the riveters lived, McCartney's
bugle, a weapon of offence on Sundays and festivals, brayed desperately,
calling to "Stables." Engine after engine toiling home along the spurs
at the end of her day's work whistled in answer till the whistles were
answered from the far bank. Then the big gong thundered thrice for a
sign that it was flood and not fire; conch, drum, and whistle echoed the
call, and the village quivered to the sound of bare feet running upon
soft earth. The order in all cases was to stand by the day's work and
wait instructions. The gangs poured by in the dusk; men stopping to
knot a loin-cloth or fasten a sandal; gang-foremen shouting to their
subordinates as they ran or paused by the tool-issue sheds for bars
and mattocks; locomotives creeping down their tracks wheel-deep in
the crowd; till the brown torrent disappeared into the dusk of the
river-bed, raced over the pilework, swarmed along the lattices,
clustered by the cranes, and stood still--each man in his place.

Then the troubled beating of the gong carried the order to take up
everything and bear it beyond high-water mark, and the flare-lamps broke
out by the hundred between the webs of dull iron as the riveters began a
night's work, racing against the flood that was to come. The girders of
the three centre piers--those that stood on the cribs--were all but in
position. They needed just as many rivets as could be driven into them,
for the flood would assuredly wash out their supports, and the ironwork
would settle down on the caps of stone if they were not blocked at the
ends. A hundred crowbars strained at the sleepers of the temporary line
that fed the unfinished piers. It was heaved up in lengths, loaded
into trucks, and backed up the bank beyond flood-level by the groaning
locomotives. The tool-sheds on the sands melted away before the attack
of shouting armies, and with them went the stacked ranks of Government
stores, iron-hound boxes of rivets, pliers, cutters, duplicate parts of
the riveting-machines, spare pumps and chains. The big crane would be
the last to be shifted, for she was hoisting all the heavy stuff up to
the main structure of the bridge. The concrete blocks on the fleet of
stone-boats were dropped overside, where there was any depth of water,
to guard the piers, and the empty boats themselves were poled under the
bridge down-stream. It was here that Peroo's pipe shrilled loudest, for
the first stroke of the big gong had brought the dinghy back at racing
speed, and Peroo and his people were stripped to the waist, working for
the honour and credit which are better than life.

"I knew she would speak," he cried. "I knew, but the telegraph gives us
good warning. O sons of unthinkable begetting--children of unspeakable
shame--are we here for the look of the thing?" It was two feet of
wire-rope frayed at the ends, and it did wonders as Peroo leaped from
gunnel to gunnel, shouting the language of the sea.

Findlayson was more troubled for the stoneboats than anything else.
McCartney, with his gangs, was blocking up the ends of the three
doubtful spans, but boats adrift, if the flood chanced to be a high one,
might endanger the girders; and there was a very fleet in the shrunken
channel.

"Get them behind the swell of the guardtower," he shouted down to Peroo.
"It will be dead-water there. Get them below the bridge."

"Accha! [Very good.] I know; we are mooring them with wire-rope," was
the answer. "Heh! Listen to the Chota Sahib. He is working hard."

From across the river came an almost continuous whistling of
locomotives, backed by the rumble of stone. Hitchcock at the last minute
was spending a few hundred more trucks of Tarakee stone in reinforcing
his spurs and embankments.

"The bridge challenges Mother Gunga," said Peroo, with a laugh. "But
when she talks I know whose voice will be the loudest."

For hours the naked men worked, screaming and shouting under the lights.
It was a hot, moonless night; the end of it was darkened by clouds and a
sudden squall that made Findlayson very grave.

"She moves!" said Peroo, just before the dawn. "Mother Gunga is awake!
Hear!" He dipped his hand over the side of a boat and the current
mumbled on it. A little wave hit the side of a pier with a crisp slap.

"Six hours before her time," said Findlayson, mopping his forehead
savagely.

"Now we can't depend on anything. We'd better clear all hands out of the
riverbed."

Again the big gong beat, and a second time there was the rushing of
naked feet on earth and ringing iron; the clatter of tools ceased. In
the silence, men heard the dry yawn of water crawling over thirsty sand.

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. The whisper rang in the box of
lattice work.

"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.

"Call the roll--count stores sit on your hunkers--and pray for the
bridge. That's all I can think of Good night. Don't risk your life
trying to fish out anything that may go downstream."

"Oh, I'll be as prudent as you are! 'Night. Heavens, how she's filling!
Here's the rain in earnest."

Findlayson picked his way back to his bank, sweeping the last of
McCartney's riveters before him. The gangs had spread themselves along
the embankments, regardless of the cold rain of the dawn, and there they
waited for the flood. Only Peroo kept his men together behind the swell
of the guard-tower, where the stone-boats lay tied fore and aft with
hawsers, wire-rope, and chains.