" 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 highwater 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.
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