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, 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.
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