



Produced by An Anonymous Project Gutenberg Volunteer





THE DAY'S WORK

By Rudyard Kipling




CONTENTS

     THE BRIDGE-BUILDERS
     A WALKING DELEGATE
     THE SHIP THAT FOUND HERSELF
     THE TOMB OF HIS ANCESTORS
     THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP SEA
     WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR
    .007
     THE MALTESE CAT
     BREAD UPON THE WATERS
     AN ERROR IN THE FOURTH DIMENSION
     MY SUNDAY AT HOME
     THE BRUSHWOOD BOY




THE BRIDGE-BUILDERS


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 too 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 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. 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 timber-yard. 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 workmen; 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 Find