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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Bridge-Builders, by Rudyard Kipling
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Bridge-Builders
+
+Author: Rudyard Kipling
+
+Release Date: February 25, 2006 [EBook #2163]
+Last Updated: October 7, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BRIDGE-BUILDERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Bill Stoddard and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+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-bound 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.
+
+A shrill wail ran along the line, growing to a yell, half fear and half
+wonder: the face of the river whitened from bank to hank between the
+stone facings, and the far-away spurs went out in spouts of foam. Mother
+Gunga had come bank-high in haste, and a wall of chocolate-coloured
+water was her messenger. There was a shriek above the roar of the water,
+the complaint of the spans coming down on their blocks as the cribs were
+whirled out from under their bellies. The stone-boats groaned and ground
+each other in the eddy that swung round the abutment, and their clumsy
+masts rose higher and higher against the dim sky-line.
+
+“Before she was shut between these walls we knew what she would do.
+Now she is thus cramped God only knows what she will do!” said Peroo,
+watching the furious turmoil round the guard-tower. “Ohe’! Fight, then!
+Fight hard, for it is thus that a woman wears herself out.”
+
+But Mother Gunga would not fight as Peroo desired. After the first
+down-stream plunge there came no more walls of water, but the river
+lifted herself bodily, as a snake when she drinks in midsummer, plucking
+and fingering along the revetments, and banking up behind the piers till
+even Findlayson began to recalculate the strength of his work.
+
+When day came the village gasped. “Only last night,” men said, turning
+to each other, “it was as a town in the river-bed! Look now!”
+
+And they looked and wondered afresh at the deep water, the racing water
+that licked the throat of the piers. The farther bank was veiled by
+rain, into which the bridge ran out and vanished; the spurs up-stream
+were marked by no more than eddies and spoutings, and down-stream the
+pent river, once freed of her guide-lines, had spread like a sea to
+the horizon. Then hurried by, rolling in the water, dead men and oxen
+together, with here and there a patch of thatched roof that melted when
+it touched a pier.
+
+“Big flood,” said Peroo, and Findlayson nodded. It was as big a flood as
+he had any wish to watch. His bridge would stand what was upon her
+now, but not very much more, and if by any of a thousand chances there
+happened to be a weakness in the embankments, Mother Gunga would carry
+his honour to the sea with the other raffle. Worst of all, there was
+nothing to do except to sit still; and Findlayson sat still under his
+macintosh till his helmet became pulp on his head, and his boots were
+over-ankle in mire. He took no count of time, for the river was marking
+the hours, inch by inch and foot by foot, along the embankment, and
+he listened, numb and hungry, to the straining of the stone-boats, the
+hollow thunder under the piers, and the hundred noises that make the
+full note of a flood. Once a dripping servant brought him food, but he
+could not eat; and once he thought that he heard a faint toot from a
+locomotive across the river, and then he smiled. The bridge’s failure
+would hurt his assistant not a little, but Hitchcock was a young
+man with his big work yet to do. For himself the crash meant
+everything--everything that made a hard life worth the living. They
+would say, the men of his own profession . . . he remembered the
+half-pitying things that he himself had said when Lockhart’s new
+waterworks burst and broke down in brick-heaps and sludge, and
+Lockhart’s spirit broke in him and he died. He remembered what he
+himself had said when the Sumao Bridge went out in the big cyclone by
+the sea; and most he remembered poor Hartopp’s face three weeks
+later, when the shame had marked it. His bridge was twice the size
+of Hartopp’s, and it carried the Findlayson truss as well as the new
+pier-shoe--the Findlayson bolted shoe. There were no excuses in his
+service. Government might listen, perhaps, but his own kind would judge
+him by his bridge, as that stood or fell. He went over it in his head,
+plate by plate, span by span, brick by brick, pier by pier, remembering,
+comparing, estimating, and recalculating, lest there should be any
+mistake; and through the long hours and through the flights of formulae
+that danced and wheeled before him a cold fear would come to pinch his
+heart. His side of the sum was beyond question; but what man knew Mother
+Gunga’s arithmetic? Even as he was making all sure by the multiplication
+table, the river might be scooping a pot-hole to the very bottom of
+any one of those eighty-foot piers that carried his reputation. Again a
+servant came to him with food, but his mouth was dry, and he could only
+drink and return to the decimals in his brain. And the river was still
+rising. Peroo, in a mat shelter coat, crouched at his feet, watching now
+his face and now the face of the river, but saying nothing.
+
+At last the Lascar rose and floundered through the mud towards the
+village, but he was careful to leave an ally to watch the boats.
+
+Presently he returned, most irreverently driving before him the priest
+of his creed--a fat old man, with a grey beard that whipped the wind
+with the wet cloth that blew over his shoulder. Never was seen so
+lamentable a guru.
+
+“What good are offerings and little kerosene lamps and dry grain,”
+ shouted Peroo, “if squatting in the mud is all that thou canst do? Thou
+hast dealt long with the Gods when they were contented and well-wishing.
+Now they are angry. Speak to them!”
+
+“What is a man against the wrath of Gods?” whined the priest, cowering
+as the wind took him. “Let me go to the temple, and I will pray there.”
+
+“Son of a pig, pray here! Is there no return for salt fish and curry
+powder and dried onions? Call aloud! Tell Mother Gunga we have had
+enough. Bid her be still for the night. I cannot pray, but I have been
+serving in the Kumpani’s boats, and when men did not obey my orders I--”
+ A flourish of the wire-rope colt rounded the sentence, and the priest,
+breaking free from his disciple, fled to the village.
+
+“Fat pig!” said Peroo. “After all that we have done for him! When the
+flood is down I will see to it that we get a new guru. Finlinson Sahib,
+it darkens for night now, and since yesterday nothing has been eaten. Be
+wise, Sahib. No man can endure watching and great thinking on an empty
+belly. Lie down, Sahib. The river will do what the river will do.”
+
+“The bridge is mine; I cannot leave it.”
+
+“Wilt thou hold it up with thy hands, then?” said Peroo, laughing.
+
+“I was troubled for my boats and sheers before the flood came. Now we
+are in the hands of the Gods. The Sahib will not eat and lie down? Take
+these, then. They are meat and good toddy together, and they kill all
+weariness, besides the fever that follows the rain. I have eaten nothing
+else to-day at all.”
+
+He took a small tin tobacco-box from his sodden waist-belt and thrust
+it into Findlayson’s hand, saying: “Nay, do not be afraid. It is no more
+than opium--clean Malwa opium.”
+
+Findlayson shook two or three of the dark-brown pellets into his hand,
+and hardly knowing what he did, swallowed them. The stuff was at least
+a good guard against fever--the fever that was creeping upon him out of
+the wet mud--and he had seen what Peroo could do in the stewing mists of
+autumn on the strength of a dose from the tin box.
+
+Peroo nodded with bright eyes. “In a little--in a little the Sahib
+will find that he thinks well again. I too will--” He dived into his
+treasure-box, resettled the rain-coat over his head, and squatted down
+to watch the boats. It was too dark now to see beyond the first pier,
+and the night seemed to have given the river new strength. Findlayson
+stood with his chin on his chest, thinking. There was one point about
+one of the piers--the seventh--that he had not fully settled in his
+mind. The figures would not shape themselves to the eye except one by
+one and at enormous intervals of time. There was a sound rich and mellow
+in his ears like the deepest note of a double-bass--an entrancing sound
+upon which he pondered for several hours, as it seemed. Then Peroo
+was at his elbow, shouting that a wire hawser had snapped and the
+stone-boats were loose. Findlayson saw the fleet open and swing out
+fanwise to a long-drawn shriek of wire straining across gunnels.
+
+“A tree hit them. They will all go,” cried Peroo. “The main hawser has
+parted. What does the Sahib do?”
+
+An immensely complex plan had suddenly flashed into Findlayson’s
+mind. He saw the ropes running from boat to boat in straight lines and
+angles--each rope a line of white fire. But there was one rope which was
+the master rope. He could see that rope. If he could pull it once, it
+was absolutely and mathematically certain that the disordered fleet
+would reassemble itself in the backwater behind the guard-tower. But
+why, he wondered, was Peroo clinging so desperately to his waist as he
+hastened down the bank? It was necessary to put the Lascar aside, gently
+and slowly, because it was necessary to save the boats, and, further,
+to demonstrate the extreme ease of the problem that looked so difficult.
+And then--but it was of no conceivable importance--a wire-rope raced
+through his hand, burning it, the high bank disappeared, and with it
+all the slowly dispersing factors of the problem. He was sitting in the
+rainy darkness--sitting in a boat that spun like a top, and Peroo was
+standing over him.
+
+“I had forgotten,” said the Lascar, slowly, “that to those fasting and
+unused, the opium is worse than any wine. Those who die in Gunga go to
+the Gods. Still, I have no desire to present myself before such great
+ones. Can the Sahib swim?”
+
+“What need? He can fly--fly as swiftly as the wind,” was the thick
+answer.
+
+“He is mad!” muttered Peroo, under his breath. “And he threw me aside
+like a bundle of dung-cakes. Well, he will not know his death. The boat
+cannot live an hour here even if she strike nothing. It is not good to
+look at death with a clear eye.”
+
+He refreshed himself again from the tin box, squatted down in the bows
+of the reeling, pegged, and stitched craft, staring through the mist at
+the nothing that was there. A warm drowsiness crept over Findlayson,
+the Chief Engineer, whose duty was with his bridge. The heavy raindrops
+struck him with a thousand tingling little thrills, and the weight of
+all time since time was made hung heavy on his eyelids. He thought and
+perceived that he was perfectly secure, for the water was so solid that
+a man could surely step out upon it, and, standing still with his legs
+apart to keep his balance--this was the most important point--would be
+borne with great and easy speed to the shore. But yet a better plan came
+to him. It needed only an exertion of will for the soul to hurl the
+body ashore as wind drives paper, to waft it kite-fashion to the bank.
+Thereafter--the boat spun dizzily--suppose the high wind got under the
+freed body? Would it tower up like a kite and pitch headlong on the
+far-away sands, or would it duck about, beyond control, through all
+eternity? Findlayson gripped the gunnel to anchor himself, for it seemed
+that he was on the edge of taking the flight before he had settled all
+his plans. Opium has more effect on the white man than the black. Peroo
+was only comfortably indifferent to accidents. “She cannot live,” he
+grunted. “Her seams open already. If she were even a dinghy with oars
+we could have ridden it out; but a box with holes is no good. Finlinson
+Sahib, she fills.”
+
+“Accha! I am going away. Come thou also.” In his mind, Findlayson had
+already escaped from the boat, and was circling high in air to find a
+rest for the sole of his foot. His body--he was really sorry for its
+gross helplessness--lay in the stern, the water rushing about its knees.
+
+“How very ridiculous!” he said to himself from his eyrie--“that--is
+Findlayson--chief of the Kashi Bridge. The poor beast is going to
+be drowned, too. Drowned when it’s close to shore. I’m--I’m on shore
+already. Why doesn’t it come along?”
+
+To his intense disgust, he found his soul back in his body again, and
+that body spluttering and choking in deep water. The pain of the reunion
+was atrocious, but it was necessary, also, to fight for the body. He was
+conscious of grasping wildly at wet sand, and striding prodigiously, as
+one strides in a dream, to keep foothold in the swirling water, till
+at last he hauled himself clear of the hold of the river, and dropped,
+panting, on wet earth.
+
+“Not this night,” said Peroo, in his ear. “The Gods have protected
+us.” The Lascar moved his feet cautiously, and they rustled among dried
+stumps. “This is some island of last year’s indigo-crop,” he went on.
+“We shall find no men here; but have great care, Sahib; all the snakes
+of a hundred miles have been flooded out. Here comes the lightning,
+on the heels of the wind. Now we shall be able to look; but walk
+carefully.”
+
+Findlayson was far and far beyond any fear of snakes, or indeed any
+merely human emotion. He saw, after he had rubbed the water from his
+eyes, with an immense clearness, and trod, so it seemed to himself with
+world-encompassing strides. Somewhere in the night of time he had built
+a bridge--a bridge that spanned illimitable levels of shining seas; but
+the Deluge had swept it away, leaving this one island under heaven for
+Findlayson and his companion, sole survivors of the breed of Man.
+
+An incessant lightning, forked and blue, showed all that there was to
+be seen on the little patch in the flood--a clump of thorn, a clump
+of swaying creaking bamboos, and a grey gnarled peepul overshadowing a
+Hindoo shrine, from whose dome floated a tattered red flag. The holy man
+whose summer resting-place it was had long since abandoned it, and
+the weather had broken the red-daubed image of his god. The two men
+stumbled, heavy-limbed and heavy-eyed, over the ashes of a brick-set
+cooking-place, and dropped down under the shelter of the branches, while
+the rain and river roared together.
+
+The stumps of the indigo crackled, and there was a smell of cattle, as a
+huge and dripping Brahminee bull shouldered his way under the tree. The
+flashes revealed the trident mark of Shiva on his flank, the insolence
+of head and hump, the luminous stag-like eyes, the brow crowned with a
+wreath of sodden marigold blooms, and the silky dewlap that almost swept
+the ground. There was a noise behind him of other beasts coming up
+from the flood-line through the thicket, a sound of heavy feet and deep
+breathing.
+
+“Here be more beside ourselves,” said Findlayson, his head against the
+treepole, looking through half-shut eyes, wholly at ease.
+
+“Truly,” said Peroo, thickly, “and no small ones.”
+
+“What are they, then? I do not see clearly.”
+
+“The Gods. Who else? Look!”
+
+“Ah, true! The Gods surely--the Gods.” Findlayson smiled as his head
+fell forward on his chest. Peroo was eminently right. After the Flood,
+who should be alive in the land except the Gods that made it--the Gods
+to whom his village prayed nightly--the Gods who were in all men’s
+mouths and about all men’s ways. He could not raise his head or stir a
+finger for the trance that held him, and Peroo was smiling vacantly at
+the lightning.
+
+The Bull paused by the shrine, his head lowered to the damp earth. A
+green Parrot in the branches preened his wet wings and screamed against
+the thunder as the circle under the tree filled with the shifting
+shadows of beasts. There was a black Buck at the Bull’s heels-such a
+Buck as Findlayson in his far-away life upon earth might have seen in
+dreams--a Buck with a royal head, ebon back, silver belly, and gleaming
+straight horns. Beside him, her head bowed to the ground, the green eyes
+burning under the heavy brows, with restless tail switching the dead
+grass, paced a Tigress, full-bellied and deep-jowled.
+
+The Bull crouched beside the shrine, and there leaped from the darkness
+a monstrous grey Ape, who seated himself man-wise in the place of the
+fallen image, and the rain spilled like jewels from the hair of his neck
+and shoulders. Other shadows came and went behind the circle, among
+them a drunken Man flourishing staff and drinking-bottle. Then a hoarse
+bellow broke out from near the ground. “The flood lessens even now,” it
+cried. “Hour by hour the water falls, and their bridge still stands!”
+
+“My bridge,” said Findlayson to himself “That must be very old work now.
+What have the Gods to do with my bridge?”
+
+His eyes rolled in the darkness following the roar. A Mugger--the
+blunt-nosed, ford-haunting Mugger of the Ganges--draggled herself before
+the beasts, lashing furiously to right and left with her tail.
+
+“They have made it too strong for me. In all this night I have only torn
+away a handful of planks. The walls stand. The towers stand. They have
+chained my flood, and the river is not free any more. Heavenly Ones,
+take this yoke away! Give me clear water between bank and bank! It is I,
+Mother Gunga, that speak. The Justice of the Gods! Deal me the Justice
+of the Gods!”
+
+“What said I?” whispered Peroo. “This is in truth a Punchayet of the
+Gods. Now we know that all the world is dead, save you and I, Sahib.”
+
+The Parrot screamed and fluttered again, and the Tigress, her ears flat
+to her head, snarled wickedly.
+
+Somewhere in the shadow, a great trunk and gleaming tusks swayed to and
+fro, and a low gurgle broke the silence that followed on the snarl.
+
+“We be here,” said a deep voice, “the Great Ones. One only and very
+many. Shiv, my father, is here, with Indra. Kali has spoken already.
+Hanuman listens also.”
+
+“Kashi is without her Kotwal to-night,” shouted the Man with the
+drinking-bottle, flinging his staff to the ground, while the island rang
+to the baying of hounds. “Give her the Justice of the Gods.”
+
+“Ye were still when they polluted my waters,” the great Crocodile
+bellowed. “Ye made no sign when my river was trapped between the walls.
+I had no help save my own strength, and that failed--the strength of
+Mother Gunga failed--before their guard-towers. What could I do? I have
+done everything. Finish now, Heavenly Ones!”
+
+“I brought the death; I rode the spotted sick-ness from hut to hut of
+their workmen, and yet they would not cease.” A nose-slitten, hide-worn
+Ass, lame, scissor-legged, and galled, limped forward. “I cast the death
+at them out of my nostrils, but they would not cease.”
+
+Peroo would have moved, but the opium lay heavy upon him.
+
+“Bah!” he said, spitting. “Here is Sitala herself; Mata--the small-pox.
+Has the Sahib a handkerchief to put over his face?”
+
+“Little help! They fed me the corpses for a month, and I flung them out
+on my sand-bars, but their work went forward. Demons they are, and sons
+of demons! And ye left Mother Gunga alone for their fire-carriage to
+make a mock of The Justice of the Gods on the bridge-builders!”
+
+The Bull turned the cud in his mouth and answered slowly: “If the
+Justice of the Gods caught all who made a mock of holy things there
+would be many dark altars in the land, mother.”
+
+“But this goes beyond a mock,” said the Tigress, darting forward a
+griping paw. “Thou knowest, Shiv, and ye, too, Heavenly Ones; ye know
+that they have defiled Gunga. Surely they must come to the Destroyer.
+Let Indra judge.”
+
+The Buck made no movement as he answered: “How long has this evil been?
+
+“Three years, as men count years,” said the Mugger, close pressed to the
+earth.
+
+“Does Mother Gunga die, then, in a year, that she is so anxious to
+see vengeance now? The deep sea was where she runs but yesterday, and
+to-morrow the sea shall cover her again as the Gods count that which men
+call time. Can any say that this their bridge endures till to-morrow?”
+ said the Buck.
+
+There was a long hush, and in the clearing of the storm the full moon
+stood up above the dripping trees.
+
+“Judge ye, then,” said the River, sullenly. “I have spoken my shame. The
+flood falls still. I can do no more.”
+
+“For my own part,”--it was the voice of the great Ape seated within the
+shrine--“it pleases me well to watch these men, remembering that I also
+builded no small bridge in the world’s youth.”
+
+“They say, too,” snarled the Tiger, “that these men came of the wreck of
+thy armies, Hanuman, and therefore thou hast aided--”
+
+“They toil as my armies toiled in Lanka, and they believe that their
+toil endures. Indra is too high, but Shiv, thou knowest how the land is
+threaded with their fire-carriages.”
+
+“Yea, I know,” said the Bull. “Their Gods instructed them in the
+matter.”
+
+A laugh ran round the circle.
+
+“Their Gods! What should their Gods know? They were born yesterday, and
+those that made them are scarcely yet cold,” said the Mugger. “To-morrow
+their Gods will die.”
+
+“Ho!” said Peroo. “Mother Gunga talks good talk. I told that to the
+padre-sahib who preached on the Mombassa, and he asked the Burra Malum
+to put me in irons for a great rudeness.”
+
+“Surely they make these things to please their Gods,” said the Bull
+again.
+
+“Not altogether,” the Elephant rolled forth. “It is for the profit of
+my mahajuns--my fat money-lenders that worship me at each new year, when
+they draw my image at the head of the account-books. I, looking over
+their shoulders by lamplight, see that the names in the books are
+those of men in far places--for all the towns are drawn together by
+the fire-carriage, and the money comes and goes swiftly, and the
+account-books grow as fat as--myself. And I, who am Ganesh of Good Luck,
+I bless my peoples.”
+
+“They have changed the face of the land-which is my land. They have
+killed and made new towns on my banks,” said the Mugger.
+
+“It is but the shifting of a little dirt. Let the dirt dig in the dirt
+if it pleases the dirt,” answered the Elephant.
+
+“But afterwards?” said the Tiger. “Afterwards they will see that Mother
+Gunga can avenge no insult, and they fall away from her first, and later
+from us all, one by one. In the end, Ganesh, we are left with naked
+altars.”
+
+The drunken Man staggered to his feet, and hiccupped vehemently.
+
+“Kali lies. My sister lies. Also this my stick is the Kotwal of Kashi,
+and he keeps tally of my pilgrims. When the time comes to worship
+Bhairon-and it is always time--the fire-carriages move one by one, and
+each bears a thousand pilgrims. They do not come afoot any more, but
+rolling upon wheels, and my honour is increased.”
+
+“Gunga, I have seen thy bed at Pryag black with the pilgrims,” said the
+Ape, leaning forward, “and but for the fire-carriage they would have
+come slowly and in fewer numbers. Remember.”
+
+“They come to me always,” Bhairon went on thickly. “By day and night
+they pray to me, all the Common People in the fields and the roads.
+Who is like Bhairon to-day? What talk is this of changing faiths? Is my
+staff Kotwal of Kashi for nothing? He keeps the tally, and he says that
+never were so many altars as today, and the fire-carriage serves them
+well. Bhairon am I--Bhairon of the Common People, and the chiefest of
+the Heavenly Ones to-day. Also my staff says--”
+
+“Peace, thou,” lowed the Bull. “The worship of the schools is mine,
+and they talk very wisely, asking whether I be one or many, as is the
+delight of my people, and ye know what I am. Kali, my wife, thou knowest
+also.”
+
+“Yea, I know,” said the Tigress, with lowered head.
+
+“Greater am I than Gunga also. For ye know who moved the minds of men
+that they should count Gunga holy among the rivers. Who die in that
+water--ye know how men say--come to us without punishment, and Gunga
+knows that the fire-carriage has borne to her scores upon scores of such
+anxious ones; and Kali knows that she has held her chiefest festivals
+among the pilgrimages that are fed by the fire-carriage. Who smote at
+Pooree, under the Image there, her thousands in a day and a night, and
+bound the sickness to the wheels of the fire-carriages, so that it
+ran from one end of the land to the other? Who but Kali? Before the
+fire-carriage came it was a heavy toil. The fire-carriages have served
+thee well, Mother of Death. But I speak for mine own altars, who am not
+Bhairon of the Common Folk, but Shiv. Men go to and fro, making words
+and telling talk of strange Gods, and I listen. Faith follows faith
+among my people in the schools, and I have no anger; for when all words
+are said, and the new talk is ended, to Shiv men return at the last.”
+
+“True. It is true,” murmured Hanuman. “To Shiv and to the others,
+mother, they return. I creep from temple to temple in the North, where
+they worship one God and His Prophet; and presently my image is alone
+within their shrines.”
+
+“Small thanks,” said the Buck, turning his head slowly. “I am that One
+and His Prophet also.”
+
+“Even so, father,” said Hanuman. “And to the South I go who am the
+oldest of the Gods as men know the Gods, and presently I touch
+the shrines of the New Faith and the Woman whom we know is hewn
+twelve-armed, and still they call her Mary.”
+
+“Small thanks, brother,” said the Tigress. “I am that Woman.”
+
+“Even so, sister; and I go West among the fire-carriages, and stand
+before the bridge-builders in many shapes, and because of me they change
+their faiths and are very wise. Ho! ho! I am the builder of bridges,
+indeed--bridges between this and that, and each bridge leads surely
+to Us in the end. Be content, Gunga. Neither these men nor those that
+follow them mock thee at all.”
+
+“Am I alone, then, Heavenly Ones? Shall I smooth out my flood lest
+unhappily I bear away their walls? Will Indra dry my springs in the
+hills and make me crawl humbly between their wharfs? Shall I bury me in
+the sand ere I offend?”
+
+“And all for the sake of a little iron bar with the fire-carriage atop.
+Truly, Mother Gunga is always young!” said Ganesh the Elephant. “A
+child had not spoken more foolishly. Let the dirt dig in the dirt ere it
+return to the dirt. I know only that my people grow rich and praise
+me. Shiv has said that the men of the schools do not forget; Bhairon is
+content for his crowd of the Common People; and Hanuman laughs.”
+
+“Surely I laugh,” said the Ape. “My altars are few beside those of
+Ganesh or Bhairon, but the fire-carriages bring me new worshippers from
+beyond the Black Water--the men who believe that their God is toil. I
+run before them beckoning, and they follow Hanuman.”
+
+“Give them the toil that they desire, then,” said the River. “Make a bar
+across my flood and throw the water back upon the bridge. Once thou wast
+strong in Lanka, Hanuman. Stoop and lift my bed.”
+
+“Who gives life can take life.” The Ape scratched in the mud with a long
+forefinger. “And yet, who would profit by the killing? Very many would
+die.”
+
+There came up from the water a snatch of a love-song such as the boys
+sing when they watch their cattle in the noon heats of late spring. The
+Parrot screamed joyously, sidling along his branch with lowered head as
+the song grew louder, and in a patch of clear moonlight stood revealed
+the young herd, the darling of the Gopis, the idol of dreaming maids
+and of mothers ere their children are born Krishna the Well-beloved. He
+stooped to knot up his long wet hair, and the Parrot fluttered to his
+shoulder.
+
+“Fleeting and singing, and singing and fleeting,” hiccupped Bhairon.
+“Those make thee late for the council, brother.”
+
+“And then?” said Krishna, with a laugh, throwing back his head. “Ye can
+do little without me or Karma here.” He fondled the Parrot’s plumage
+and laughed again. “What is this sitting and talking together? I heard
+Mother Gunga roaring in the dark, and so came quickly from a hut where I
+lay warm. And what have ye done to Karma, that he is so wet and silent?
+And what does Mother Gunga here? Are the heavens full that ye must come
+paddling in the mud beast-wise? Karma, what do they do?”
+
+“Gunga has prayed for a vengeance on the bridge-builders, and Kali is
+with her. Now she bids Hanuman whelm the bridge, that her honour may be
+made great,” cried the Parrot. “I waited here, knowing that thou wouldst
+come, O my master!
+
+“And the Heavenly Ones said nothing? Did Gunga and the Mother of Sorrows
+out-talk them? Did none speak for my people?”
+
+“Nay,” said Ganesh, moving uneasily from foot to foot; “I said it was
+but dirt at play, and why should we stamp it flat?”
+
+“I was content to let them toil--well content,” said Hanuman.
+
+“What had I to do with Gunga’s anger?” said the Bull.
+
+“I am Bhairon of the Common Folk, and this my staff is Kotwal of all
+Kashi. I spoke for the Common People.”
+
+“Thou?” The young God’s eyes sparkled.
+
+“Am I not the first of the Gods in their mouths to-day?” returned
+Bhairon, unabashed. “For the sake of the Common People I said--very many
+wise things which I have now forgotten, but this my staff-”
+
+Krishna turned impatiently, saw the Mugger at his feet, and kneeling,
+slipped an arm round the cold neck. “Mother,” he said gently, “get thee
+to thy flood again. The matter is not for thee. What harm shall thy
+honour take of this live dirt? Thou hast given them their fields new
+year after year, and by thy flood they are made strong. They come all to
+thee at the last. What need to slay them now? Have pity, mother, for a
+little--and it is only for a little.”
+
+“If it be only for a little,” the slow beast began.
+
+
+
+“Are they Gods, then?” Krishna returned with a laugh, his eyes looking
+into the dull eyes of the River. “Be certain that it is only for a
+little. The Heavenly Ones have heard thee, and presently justice will
+be done. Go now, mother, to the flood again. Men and cattle are thick on
+the waters--the banks fall--the villages melt because of thee.”
+
+“But the bridge--the bridge stands.” The Mugger turned grunting into the
+undergrowth as Krishna rose.
+
+“It is ended,” said the Tigress, viciously. “There is no more justice
+from the Heavenly Ones. Ye have made shame and sport of Gunga, who asked
+no more than a few score lives.”
+
+“Of my people--who lie under the leaf-roofs of the village yonder--of
+the young girls, and the young men who sing to them in the dark--of the
+child that will be born next morn--of that which was begotten to-night,”
+ said Krishna. “And when all is done, what profit? To-morrow sees them
+at work. Ay, if ye swept the bridge out from end to end they would begin
+anew. Hear me! Bhairon is drunk always. Hanuman mocks his people with
+new riddles.”
+
+“Nay, but they are very old ones,” the Ape said, laughing.
+
+“Shiv hears the talk of the schools and the dreams of the holy men;
+Ganesh thinks only of his fat traders; but I--I live with these my
+people, asking for no gifts, and so receiving them hourly.”
+
+“And very tender art thou of thy people,” said the Tigress.
+
+“They are my own. The old women dream of me turning in their sleep; the
+maids look and listen for me when they go to fill their lotahs by the
+river. I walk by the young men waiting without the gates at dusk, and I
+call over my shoulder to the white-beards. Ye know, Heavenly Ones, that
+I alone of us all walk upon the earth continually, and have no pleasure
+in our heavens so long as a green blade springs here, or there are two
+voices at twilight in the standing crops. Wise are ye, but ye live
+far off; forgetting whence ye came. So do I not forget. And the
+fire-carriage feeds your shrines, ye say? And the fire-carriages bring
+a thousand pilgrims where but ten came in the old years? True. That is
+true, to-day.”
+
+“But to-morrow they are dead, brother,” said Ganesh.
+
+“Peace!” said the Bull, as Hanuman leaned forward again. “And to-morrow,
+beloved--what of to-morrow?”
+
+“This only. A new word creeping from mouth to mouth among the Common
+Folk--a word that neither man nor God can lay hold of--an evil word--a
+little lazy word among the Common Folk, saying (and none know who set
+that word afoot) that they weary of ye, Heavenly Ones.”
+
+The Gods laughed together softly. “And then, beloved,” they said.
+
+“And to cover that weariness they, my people, will bring to thee, Shiv,
+and to thee, Ganesh, at first greater offerings and a louder noise of
+worship. But the word has gone abroad, and, after, they will pay fewer
+dues to your fat Brahmins. Next they will forget your altars, but so
+slowly that no man can say how his forgetfulness began.”
+
+“I knew--I knew! I spoke this also, but they would not hear,” said the
+Tigress. “We should have slain-we should have slain!”
+
+“It is too late now. Ye should have slain at the beginning when the men
+from across the water had taught our folk nothing. Now my people see
+their work, and go away thinking. They do not think of the Heavenly Ones
+altogether. They think of the fire-carriage and the other things that
+the bridge-builders have done, and when your priests thrust forward
+hands asking alms, they give a little unwillingly. That is the
+beginning, among one or two, or five or ten--for I, moving among my
+people, know what is in their hearts.”
+
+“And the end, Jester of the Gods? What shall the end be?” said Ganesh.
+
+“The end shall be as it was in the beginning, O slothful son of Shiv!
+The flame shall die upon the altars and the prayer upon the tongue till
+ye become little Gods again--Gods of the jungle--names that the hunters
+of rats and noosers of dogs whisper in the thicket and among the
+caves--rag-Gods, pot Godlings of the tree, and the village-mark, as
+ye were at the beginning. That is the end, Ganesh, for thee, and for
+Bhairon--Bhairon of the Common People.”
+
+“It is very far away,” grunted Bhairon. “Also, it is a lie.”
+
+“Many women have kissed Krishna. They told him this to cheer their own
+hearts when the grey hairs came, and he has told us the tale,” said the
+Bull, below his breath.
+
+“Their Gods came, and we changed them. I took the Woman and made her
+twelve-armed. So shall we twist all their Gods,” said Hanuman.
+
+“Their Gods! This is no question of their Gods--one or three--man or
+woman. The matter is with the people. I move, and not the Gods of the
+bridge-builders,” said Krishna.
+
+“So be it. I have made a man worship the fire-carriage as it stood still
+breathing smoke, and he knew not that he worshipped me,” said Hanuman
+the Ape. “They will only change a little the names of their Gods.
+I shall lead the builders of the bridges as of old; Shiv shall be
+worshipped in the schools by such as doubt and despise their fellows;
+Ganesh shall have his mahajuns, and Bhairon the donkey-drivers, the
+pilgrims, and the sellers of toys. Beloved, they will do no more than
+change the names, and that we have seen a thousand times.”
+
+“Surely they will do no more than change the names,” echoed Ganesh; but
+there was an uneasy movement among the Gods.
+
+“They will change more than the names. Me alone they cannot kill, so
+long as a maiden and a man meet together or the spring follows the
+winter rains. Heavenly Ones, not for nothing have I walked upon the
+earth. My people know not now what they know; but I, who live with
+them, I read their hearts. Great Kings, the beginning of the end is born
+already. The fire-carriages shout the names of new Gods that are not the
+old under new names. Drink now and eat greatly! Bathe your faces in the
+smoke of the altars before they grow cold! Take dues and listen to the
+cymbals and the drums, Heavenly Ones, while yet there are flowers and
+songs. As men count time the end is far off; but as we who know reckon
+it is to-day. I have spoken.”
+
+The young God ceased, and his brethren looked at each other long in
+silence.
+
+“This I have not heard before,” Peroo whispered in his companion’s ear.
+“And yet sometimes, when I oiled the brasses in the engine-room of the
+Goorkha, I have wondered if our priests were so wise--so wise. The day
+is coming, Sahib. They will be gone by the morning.”
+
+A yellow light broadened in the sky, and the tone of the river changed
+as the darkness withdrew.
+
+Suddenly the Elephant trumpeted aloud as though man had goaded him.
+
+“Let Indra judge. Father of all, speak thou! What of the things we have
+heard? Has Krishna lied indeed? Or---”
+
+“Ye know,” said the Buck, rising to his feet. “Ye know the Riddle of the
+Gods. When Brahm ceases to dream, the Heavens and the Hells and Earth
+disappear. Be content. Brahm dreams still. The dreams come and go, and
+the nature of the dreams changes, but still Brahm dreams. Krishna has
+walked too long upon earth, and yet I love him the more for the tale he
+has told. The Gods change, beloved--all save One!”
+
+“Ay, all save one that makes love in the hearts of men,” said Krishna,
+knotting his girdle. “It is but a little time to wait, and ye shall know
+if I lie. Truly it is but a little time, as thou sayest, and we shall
+know. Get thee to thy huts again, beloved, and make sport for the young
+things, for still Brahm dreams. Go, my children! Brahm dreams and till
+he wakes the Gods die not.”
+
+“Whither went they?” said the Lascar, awe-struck, shivering a little
+with the cold.
+
+“God knows!” said Findlayson. The river and the island lay in full
+daylight now, and there was never mark of hoof or pug on the wet earth
+under the peepul. Only a parrot screamed in the branches, bringing down
+showers of water-drops as he fluttered his wings.
+
+“Up! We are cramped with cold! Has the opium died out. Canst thou move,
+Sahib?”
+
+Findlayson staggered to his feet and shook himself. His bead swam
+and ached, but the work of the opium was over, and, as he sluiced his
+forehead in a pool, the Chief Engineer of the Kashi Bridge was wondering
+how he had managed to fall upon the island, what chances the day offered
+of return, and, above all, how his work stood.
+
+“Peroo, I have forgotten much I was under the guard-tower watching the
+river; and then--Did the flood sweep us away?”
+
+“No. The boats broke loose, Sahib, and,” (if the Sahib had forgotten
+about the opium, decidedly Peroo would not remind him) “in striving to
+retie them, so it seemed to me but it was dark--a rope caught the Sahib
+and threw him upon a boat. Considering that we two, with Hitchcock
+Sahib, built, as it were, that bridge, I came also upon the boat, which
+came riding on horseback, as it were, on the nose of this island, and
+so, splitting, cast us ashore. I made a great cry when the boat left
+the wharf and without doubt Hitchcock Sahib will come for us. As for the
+bridge, so many have died in the building that it cannot fall.” A fierce
+sun, that drew out all the smell of the sodden land, had followed the
+storm, and in that clear light there was no room for a man to think of
+the dreams of the dark. Findlayson stared upstream, across the blaze of
+moving water, till his eyes ached. There was no sign of any bank to the
+Ganges, much less of a bridge-line.
+
+“We came down far,” he said. “It was wonderful that we were not drowned
+a hundred times.”
+
+“That was the least of the wonder, for no man dies before his time.
+I have seen Sydney, I have seen London, and twenty great ports,
+but,”--Peroo looked at the damp, discoloured shrine under the
+peepul--“never man has seen that we saw here.”
+
+“What?”
+
+“Has the Sahib forgotten; or do we black men only see the Gods?”
+
+“There was a fever upon me.” Findlayson was still looking uneasily
+across the water. “It seemed that the island was full of beasts and men
+talking, but I do not remember. A boat could live in this water now, I
+think.”
+
+“Oho! Then it is true. ‘When Brahm ceases to dream, the Gods die.’ Now I
+know, indeed, what he meant. Once, too, the guru said as much to me; but
+then I did not understand. Now I am wise.”
+
+“What?” said Findlayson, over his shoulder.
+
+Peroo went on as if he were talking to himself “Six--seven--ten monsoons
+since, I was watch on the fo’c’sle of the Rewah--the Kumpani’s big
+boat--and there was a big tufan; green and black water beating, and I
+held fast to the life-lines, choking under the waters. Then I thought
+of the Gods--of Those whom we saw to-night,”--he stared curiously at
+Findlayson’s back, but the white man was looking across the flood. “Yes,
+I say of Those whom we saw this night past, and I called upon Them to
+protect me. And while I prayed, still keeping my lookout, a big wave
+came and threw me forward upon the ring of the great black bow-anchor,
+and the Rewah rose high and high, leaning towards the left-hand side,
+and the water drew away from beneath her nose, and I lay upon my belly,
+holding the ring, and looking down into those great deeps. Then I
+thought, even in the face of death: If I lose hold I die, and for me
+neither the Rewah nor my place by the galley where the rice is cooked,
+nor Bombay, nor Calcutta, nor even London, will be any more for me. ‘How
+shall I be sure,’ I said, ‘that the Gods to whom I pray will abide at
+all?’ This I thought, and the Rewah dropped her nose as a hammer falls,
+and all the sea came in and slid me backwards along the fo’c’sle and
+over the break of the fo’c’sle, and I very badly bruised my shin against
+the donkey-engine: but I did not die, and I have seen the Gods. They are
+good for live men, but for the dead. . . . They have spoken Themselves.
+Therefore, when I come to the village I will beat the guru for talking
+riddles which are no riddles. When Brahm ceases to dream the Gods go.”
+
+“Look up-stream. The light blinds. Is there smoke yonder?”
+
+Peroo shaded his eyes with his hands. “He is a wise man and quick.
+Hitchcock Sahib would not trust a rowboat. He has borrowed the Rao
+Sahib’s steam-launch, and comes to look for us. I have always said that
+there should have been a steam-launch on the bridge works for us.”
+
+The territory of the Rao of Baraon lay within ten miles of the bridge;
+and Findlayson and Hitchcock had spent a fair portion of their scanty
+leisure in playing billiards and shooting blackbuck with the young man.
+He had been bearded by an English tutor of sporting tastes for some
+five or six years, and was now royally wasting the revenues accumulated
+during his minority by the Indian Government. His steam-launch, with its
+silver-plated rails, striped silk awning, and mahogany decks, was a new
+toy which Findlayson had found horribly in the way when the Rao came to
+look at the bridge works.
+
+“It’s great luck,” murmured Findlayson, but he was none the less afraid,
+wondering what news might be of the bridge.
+
+The gaudy blue-and-white funnel came downstream swiftly. They could see
+Hitchcock in the bows, with a pair of opera-glasses, and his face was
+unusually white. Then Peroo hailed, and the launch made for the tail
+of the island. The Rao Sahib, in tweed shooting-suit and a seven-hued
+turban, waved his royal hand, and Hitchcock shouted. But he need have
+asked no questions, for Findlayson’s first demand was for his bridge.
+
+“All serene! ‘Gad, I never expected to see you again, Findlayson. You’re
+seven koss downstream. Yes; there’s not a stone shifted anywhere; but
+how are you? I borrowed the Rao Sahib’s launch, and he was good enough
+to come along. Jump in. Ah, Finlinson, you are very well, eh? That was
+most unprecedented calamity last night, eh? My royal palace, too, it
+leaks like the devil, and the crops will also be short all about my
+country. Now you shall back her out, Hitchcock. I--I do not understand
+steam-engines. You are wet? You are cold, Finlinson? I have some things
+to eat here, and you will take a good drink.”
+
+“I’m immensely grateful, Rao Sahib. I believe you’ve saved my life. How
+did Hitchcock--”
+
+“Oho! His hair was upon end. He rode to me in the middle of the night
+and woke me up in the arms of Morpheus. I was most truly concerned,
+Finlinson, so I came too. My head-priest he is very angry just now. We
+will go quick, Mister Hitchcock. I am due to attend at twelve forty-five
+in the state temple, where we sanctify some new idol. If not so I
+would have asked you to spend the day with me. They are dam-bore, these
+religious ceremonies, Finlinson, eh?”
+
+Peroo, well known to the crew, had possessed himself of the inlaid
+wheel, and was taking the launch craftily up-stream. But while he
+steered he was, in his mind, handling two feet of partially untwisted
+wire-rope; and the back upon which he beat was the back of his guru.
+
+
+
+
+
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+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The Bridge-builders, by Rudyard Kipling
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
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+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
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+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
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+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
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+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Bridge-Builders, by Rudyard Kipling
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Bridge-Builders
+
+Author: Rudyard Kipling
+
+Release Date: February 25, 2006 [EBook #2163]
+Last Updated: October 7, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BRIDGE-BUILDERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Bill Stoddard and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE BRIDGE-BUILDERS
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      by Rudyard Kipling
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Findlayson, C. E., sat in his trolley on a construction line that ran
+      along one of the main revetments&mdash;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo; more material were flung out to hold the river in place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;and only he knew how strong
+      those were&mdash;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&rsquo; work on the girders of the three middle piers&mdash;his bridge,
+      raw and ugly as original sin, but pukka&mdash;permanent&mdash;to endure
+      when all memory of the builder, yea, even of the splendid Findlayson
+      truss, has perished. Practically, the thing was done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All but,&rdquo; said he, with a smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been thinking about it,&rdquo; the senior answered. &ldquo;Not half a bad job
+      for two men, is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One&mdash;and a half. &lsquo;Gad, what a Cooper&rsquo;s Hill cub I was when I came on
+      the works!&rdquo; Hitchcock felt very old in the crowded experiences of the past
+      three years, that had taught him power and responsibility.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You were rather a colt,&rdquo; said Findlayson. &ldquo;I wonder how you&rsquo;ll like going
+      back to office-work when this job&rsquo;s over.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall hate it!&rdquo; said the young man, and as he went on his eye followed
+      Findlayson&rsquo;s, and he muttered, &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t it damned good?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think we&rsquo;ll go up the service together,&rdquo; Findlayson said to himself.
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;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!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;by slipping of
+      booms, by breaking of tackle, failure of cranes, and the wrath of the
+      river&mdash;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&mdash;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&rsquo;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&mdash;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&mdash;plate by plate, girder by girder, span by span&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So the bridge was two men&rsquo;s work&mdash;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&mdash;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;All&rsquo;s well,&rdquo; 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&mdash;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. &ldquo;My honour is the honour of this bridge,&rdquo; he would
+      say to the about-to-be-dismissed. &ldquo;What do I care for your honour? Go and
+      work on a steamer. That is all you are fit for.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The little cluster of huts where he and his gang lived centred round the
+      tattered dwelling of a sea-priest&mdash;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, &ldquo;for,&rdquo; said Peroo, who had haled him a thousand miles inland, &ldquo;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&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From his trolley he could hear the whistle of the serang&rsquo;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&rsquo;c&rsquo;sle lookout: &ldquo;Ham dekhta
+      hai&rdquo; (&ldquo;I am looking out&rdquo;).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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: &ldquo;It looks well now,
+      Sahib. Our bridge is all but done. What think you Mother Gunga will say
+      when the rail runs over?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She has said little so far. It was never Mother Gunga that delayed us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is always time for her; and none the less there has been delay. Has
+      the Sahib forgotten last autumn&rsquo;s flood, when the stone-boats were sunk
+      without warning&mdash;or only a half-day&rsquo;s warning?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, but nothing save a big flood could hurt us now. The spurs are
+      holding well on the West Bank.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mother Gunga eats great allowances. There is always room for more stone
+      on the revetments. I tell this to the Chota Sahib,&rdquo;&mdash;he meant
+      Hitchcock&mdash;&ldquo;and he laughs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No matter, Peroo. Another year thou wilt be able to build a bridge in
+      thine own fashion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Lascar grinned. &ldquo;Then it will not be in this way&mdash;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In three months, when the weather is cooler.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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: &lsquo;This is not clean! Dam jibboonwallah!&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the Lord Sahib does not call me a dam jibboonwallah, Peroo.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bah! Go! I am busy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I, also!&rdquo; said Peroo, with an unshaken countenance. &ldquo;May I take the light
+      dinghy now and row along the spurs?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To hold them with thy hands? They are, I think, sufficiently heavy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Findlayson smiled at the &ldquo;we.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have bitted and bridled her. She is not like the sea, that can beat
+      against a soft beach. She is Mother Gunga&mdash;in irons.&rdquo; His voice fell
+      a little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peroo has gone up the spurs in your dinghy. He&rsquo;s taken a couple of
+      nephews with him, and he&rsquo;s lolling in the stern like a commodore,&rdquo; said
+      Hitchcock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s all right. He&rsquo;s got something on his mind. You&rsquo;d think that ten
+      years in the British India boats would have knocked most of his religion
+      out of him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So it has,&rdquo; said Hitchcock, chuckling. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All the same, if you carried off his guru he&rsquo;d leave us like a shot. He
+      was yarning away to me about praying to the dome of St. Paul&rsquo;s when he was
+      in London.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not half a bad thing to pray to, either. He&rsquo;s propitiating his own Gods
+      now, and he wants to know what Mother Gunga will think of a bridge being
+      run across her. Who&rsquo;s there?&rdquo; A shadow darkened the doorway, and a
+      telegram was put into Hitchcock&rsquo;s hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She ought to be pretty well used to it by this time. Only a tar. It ought
+      to be Ralli&rsquo;s answer about the new rivets. . . . Great Heavens!&rdquo; Hitchcock
+      jumped to his feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it?&rdquo; said the senior, and took the form. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s what Mother
+      Gunga thinks, is it,&rdquo; he said, reading. &ldquo;Keep cool, young &lsquo;un. We&rsquo;ve got
+      all our work cut out for us. Let&rsquo;s see. Muir wired half an hour ago:
+      &lsquo;Floods on the Ramgunga. Look out.&rsquo; Well, that gives us&mdash;one, two&mdash;nine
+      and a half for the flood to reach Melipur Ghaut and seven&rsquo;s sixteen and a
+      half to Lataoli&mdash;say fifteen hours before it comes down to us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s why it comes. I&rsquo;ve only known Indian rivers for five-and-twenty
+      years, and I don&rsquo;t pretend to understand. Here comes another tar.&rdquo;
+       Findlayson opened the telegram. &ldquo;Cockran, this time, from the Ganges
+      Canal: &lsquo;Heavy rains here. Bad.&rsquo; He might have saved the last word. Well,
+      we don&rsquo;t want to know any more. We&rsquo;ve got to work the gangs all night and
+      clean up the riverbed. You&rsquo;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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pontoon&mdash;one big pontoon with the overhead crane on it. T&rsquo;other
+      overhead crane on the mended pontoon, with the cart-road rivets from
+      Twenty to Twenty-three piers&mdash;two construction lines, and a
+      turning-spur. The pilework must take its chance,&rdquo; said Hitchcock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right. Roll up everything you can lay hands on. We&rsquo;ll give the gang
+      fifteen minutes more to eat their grub.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s bugle, a weapon
+      of offence on Sundays and festivals, brayed desperately, calling to
+      &ldquo;Stables.&rdquo; Engine after engine toiling home along the spurs at the end of
+      her day&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&mdash;each man in his
+      place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s work, racing against the flood that was to come. The girders of
+      the three centre piers&mdash;those that stood on the cribs&mdash;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-bound 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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I knew she would speak,&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;I knew, but the telegraph gives us
+      good warning. O sons of unthinkable begetting&mdash;children of
+      unspeakable shame&mdash;are we here for the look of the thing?&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get them behind the swell of the guardtower,&rdquo; he shouted down to Peroo.
+      &ldquo;It will be dead-water there. Get them below the bridge.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Accha! [Very good.] I know; we are mooring them with wire-rope,&rdquo; was the
+      answer. &ldquo;Heh! Listen to the Chota Sahib. He is working hard.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The bridge challenges Mother Gunga,&rdquo; said Peroo, with a laugh. &ldquo;But when
+      she talks I know whose voice will be the loudest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She moves!&rdquo; said Peroo, just before the dawn. &ldquo;Mother Gunga is awake!
+      Hear!&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Six hours before her time,&rdquo; said Findlayson, mopping his forehead
+      savagely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now we can&rsquo;t depend on anything. We&rsquo;d better clear all hands out of the
+      riverbed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;All clear your side?&rdquo; said Findlayson. The whisper rang in the box of
+      lattice work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, and the east channel&rsquo;s filling now. We&rsquo;re utterly out of our
+      reckoning. When is this thing down on us?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s no saying. She&rsquo;s filling as fast as she can. Look!&rdquo; Findlayson
+      pointed to the planks below his feet, where the sand, burned and defiled
+      by months of work, was beginning to whisper and fizz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What orders?&rdquo; said Hitchcock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Call the roll&mdash;count stores sit on your hunkers&mdash;and pray for
+      the bridge. That&rsquo;s all I can think of Good night. Don&rsquo;t risk your life
+      trying to fish out anything that may go downstream.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I&rsquo;ll be as prudent as you are! &lsquo;Night. Heavens, how she&rsquo;s filling!
+      Here&rsquo;s the rain in earnest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Findlayson picked his way back to his bank, sweeping the last of
+      McCartney&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A shrill wail ran along the line, growing to a yell, half fear and half
+      wonder: the face of the river whitened from bank to hank between the stone
+      facings, and the far-away spurs went out in spouts of foam. Mother Gunga
+      had come bank-high in haste, and a wall of chocolate-coloured water was
+      her messenger. There was a shriek above the roar of the water, the
+      complaint of the spans coming down on their blocks as the cribs were
+      whirled out from under their bellies. The stone-boats groaned and ground
+      each other in the eddy that swung round the abutment, and their clumsy
+      masts rose higher and higher against the dim sky-line.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Before she was shut between these walls we knew what she would do. Now
+      she is thus cramped God only knows what she will do!&rdquo; said Peroo, watching
+      the furious turmoil round the guard-tower. &ldquo;Ohe&rsquo;! Fight, then! Fight hard,
+      for it is thus that a woman wears herself out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Mother Gunga would not fight as Peroo desired. After the first
+      down-stream plunge there came no more walls of water, but the river lifted
+      herself bodily, as a snake when she drinks in midsummer, plucking and
+      fingering along the revetments, and banking up behind the piers till even
+      Findlayson began to recalculate the strength of his work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When day came the village gasped. &ldquo;Only last night,&rdquo; men said, turning to
+      each other, &ldquo;it was as a town in the river-bed! Look now!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And they looked and wondered afresh at the deep water, the racing water
+      that licked the throat of the piers. The farther bank was veiled by rain,
+      into which the bridge ran out and vanished; the spurs up-stream were
+      marked by no more than eddies and spoutings, and down-stream the pent
+      river, once freed of her guide-lines, had spread like a sea to the
+      horizon. Then hurried by, rolling in the water, dead men and oxen
+      together, with here and there a patch of thatched roof that melted when it
+      touched a pier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Big flood,&rdquo; said Peroo, and Findlayson nodded. It was as big a flood as
+      he had any wish to watch. His bridge would stand what was upon her now,
+      but not very much more, and if by any of a thousand chances there happened
+      to be a weakness in the embankments, Mother Gunga would carry his honour
+      to the sea with the other raffle. Worst of all, there was nothing to do
+      except to sit still; and Findlayson sat still under his macintosh till his
+      helmet became pulp on his head, and his boots were over-ankle in mire. He
+      took no count of time, for the river was marking the hours, inch by inch
+      and foot by foot, along the embankment, and he listened, numb and hungry,
+      to the straining of the stone-boats, the hollow thunder under the piers,
+      and the hundred noises that make the full note of a flood. Once a dripping
+      servant brought him food, but he could not eat; and once he thought that
+      he heard a faint toot from a locomotive across the river, and then he
+      smiled. The bridge&rsquo;s failure would hurt his assistant not a little, but
+      Hitchcock was a young man with his big work yet to do. For himself the
+      crash meant everything&mdash;everything that made a hard life worth the
+      living. They would say, the men of his own profession . . . he remembered
+      the half-pitying things that he himself had said when Lockhart&rsquo;s new
+      waterworks burst and broke down in brick-heaps and sludge, and Lockhart&rsquo;s
+      spirit broke in him and he died. He remembered what he himself had said
+      when the Sumao Bridge went out in the big cyclone by the sea; and most he
+      remembered poor Hartopp&rsquo;s face three weeks later, when the shame had
+      marked it. His bridge was twice the size of Hartopp&rsquo;s, and it carried the
+      Findlayson truss as well as the new pier-shoe&mdash;the Findlayson bolted
+      shoe. There were no excuses in his service. Government might listen,
+      perhaps, but his own kind would judge him by his bridge, as that stood or
+      fell. He went over it in his head, plate by plate, span by span, brick by
+      brick, pier by pier, remembering, comparing, estimating, and
+      recalculating, lest there should be any mistake; and through the long
+      hours and through the flights of formulae that danced and wheeled before
+      him a cold fear would come to pinch his heart. His side of the sum was
+      beyond question; but what man knew Mother Gunga&rsquo;s arithmetic? Even as he
+      was making all sure by the multiplication table, the river might be
+      scooping a pot-hole to the very bottom of any one of those eighty-foot
+      piers that carried his reputation. Again a servant came to him with food,
+      but his mouth was dry, and he could only drink and return to the decimals
+      in his brain. And the river was still rising. Peroo, in a mat shelter
+      coat, crouched at his feet, watching now his face and now the face of the
+      river, but saying nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last the Lascar rose and floundered through the mud towards the
+      village, but he was careful to leave an ally to watch the boats.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently he returned, most irreverently driving before him the priest of
+      his creed&mdash;a fat old man, with a grey beard that whipped the wind
+      with the wet cloth that blew over his shoulder. Never was seen so
+      lamentable a guru.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What good are offerings and little kerosene lamps and dry grain,&rdquo; shouted
+      Peroo, &ldquo;if squatting in the mud is all that thou canst do? Thou hast dealt
+      long with the Gods when they were contented and well-wishing. Now they are
+      angry. Speak to them!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is a man against the wrath of Gods?&rdquo; whined the priest, cowering as
+      the wind took him. &ldquo;Let me go to the temple, and I will pray there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Son of a pig, pray here! Is there no return for salt fish and curry
+      powder and dried onions? Call aloud! Tell Mother Gunga we have had enough.
+      Bid her be still for the night. I cannot pray, but I have been serving in
+      the Kumpani&rsquo;s boats, and when men did not obey my orders I&mdash;&rdquo; A
+      flourish of the wire-rope colt rounded the sentence, and the priest,
+      breaking free from his disciple, fled to the village.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fat pig!&rdquo; said Peroo. &ldquo;After all that we have done for him! When the
+      flood is down I will see to it that we get a new guru. Finlinson Sahib, it
+      darkens for night now, and since yesterday nothing has been eaten. Be
+      wise, Sahib. No man can endure watching and great thinking on an empty
+      belly. Lie down, Sahib. The river will do what the river will do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The bridge is mine; I cannot leave it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wilt thou hold it up with thy hands, then?&rdquo; said Peroo, laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was troubled for my boats and sheers before the flood came. Now we are
+      in the hands of the Gods. The Sahib will not eat and lie down? Take these,
+      then. They are meat and good toddy together, and they kill all weariness,
+      besides the fever that follows the rain. I have eaten nothing else to-day
+      at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He took a small tin tobacco-box from his sodden waist-belt and thrust it
+      into Findlayson&rsquo;s hand, saying: &ldquo;Nay, do not be afraid. It is no more than
+      opium&mdash;clean Malwa opium.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Findlayson shook two or three of the dark-brown pellets into his hand, and
+      hardly knowing what he did, swallowed them. The stuff was at least a good
+      guard against fever&mdash;the fever that was creeping upon him out of the
+      wet mud&mdash;and he had seen what Peroo could do in the stewing mists of
+      autumn on the strength of a dose from the tin box.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peroo nodded with bright eyes. &ldquo;In a little&mdash;in a little the Sahib
+      will find that he thinks well again. I too will&mdash;&rdquo; He dived into his
+      treasure-box, resettled the rain-coat over his head, and squatted down to
+      watch the boats. It was too dark now to see beyond the first pier, and the
+      night seemed to have given the river new strength. Findlayson stood with
+      his chin on his chest, thinking. There was one point about one of the
+      piers&mdash;the seventh&mdash;that he had not fully settled in his mind.
+      The figures would not shape themselves to the eye except one by one and at
+      enormous intervals of time. There was a sound rich and mellow in his ears
+      like the deepest note of a double-bass&mdash;an entrancing sound upon
+      which he pondered for several hours, as it seemed. Then Peroo was at his
+      elbow, shouting that a wire hawser had snapped and the stone-boats were
+      loose. Findlayson saw the fleet open and swing out fanwise to a long-drawn
+      shriek of wire straining across gunnels.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A tree hit them. They will all go,&rdquo; cried Peroo. &ldquo;The main hawser has
+      parted. What does the Sahib do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      An immensely complex plan had suddenly flashed into Findlayson&rsquo;s mind. He
+      saw the ropes running from boat to boat in straight lines and angles&mdash;each
+      rope a line of white fire. But there was one rope which was the master
+      rope. He could see that rope. If he could pull it once, it was absolutely
+      and mathematically certain that the disordered fleet would reassemble
+      itself in the backwater behind the guard-tower. But why, he wondered, was
+      Peroo clinging so desperately to his waist as he hastened down the bank?
+      It was necessary to put the Lascar aside, gently and slowly, because it
+      was necessary to save the boats, and, further, to demonstrate the extreme
+      ease of the problem that looked so difficult. And then&mdash;but it was of
+      no conceivable importance&mdash;a wire-rope raced through his hand,
+      burning it, the high bank disappeared, and with it all the slowly
+      dispersing factors of the problem. He was sitting in the rainy darkness&mdash;sitting
+      in a boat that spun like a top, and Peroo was standing over him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had forgotten,&rdquo; said the Lascar, slowly, &ldquo;that to those fasting and
+      unused, the opium is worse than any wine. Those who die in Gunga go to the
+      Gods. Still, I have no desire to present myself before such great ones.
+      Can the Sahib swim?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What need? He can fly&mdash;fly as swiftly as the wind,&rdquo; was the thick
+      answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is mad!&rdquo; muttered Peroo, under his breath. &ldquo;And he threw me aside like
+      a bundle of dung-cakes. Well, he will not know his death. The boat cannot
+      live an hour here even if she strike nothing. It is not good to look at
+      death with a clear eye.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He refreshed himself again from the tin box, squatted down in the bows of
+      the reeling, pegged, and stitched craft, staring through the mist at the
+      nothing that was there. A warm drowsiness crept over Findlayson, the Chief
+      Engineer, whose duty was with his bridge. The heavy raindrops struck him
+      with a thousand tingling little thrills, and the weight of all time since
+      time was made hung heavy on his eyelids. He thought and perceived that he
+      was perfectly secure, for the water was so solid that a man could surely
+      step out upon it, and, standing still with his legs apart to keep his
+      balance&mdash;this was the most important point&mdash;would be borne with
+      great and easy speed to the shore. But yet a better plan came to him. It
+      needed only an exertion of will for the soul to hurl the body ashore as
+      wind drives paper, to waft it kite-fashion to the bank. Thereafter&mdash;the
+      boat spun dizzily&mdash;suppose the high wind got under the freed body?
+      Would it tower up like a kite and pitch headlong on the far-away sands, or
+      would it duck about, beyond control, through all eternity? Findlayson
+      gripped the gunnel to anchor himself, for it seemed that he was on the
+      edge of taking the flight before he had settled all his plans. Opium has
+      more effect on the white man than the black. Peroo was only comfortably
+      indifferent to accidents. &ldquo;She cannot live,&rdquo; he grunted. &ldquo;Her seams open
+      already. If she were even a dinghy with oars we could have ridden it out;
+      but a box with holes is no good. Finlinson Sahib, she fills.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Accha! I am going away. Come thou also.&rdquo; In his mind, Findlayson had
+      already escaped from the boat, and was circling high in air to find a rest
+      for the sole of his foot. His body&mdash;he was really sorry for its gross
+      helplessness&mdash;lay in the stern, the water rushing about its knees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How very ridiculous!&rdquo; he said to himself from his eyrie&mdash;&ldquo;that&mdash;is
+      Findlayson&mdash;chief of the Kashi Bridge. The poor beast is going to be
+      drowned, too. Drowned when it&rsquo;s close to shore. I&rsquo;m&mdash;I&rsquo;m on shore
+      already. Why doesn&rsquo;t it come along?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To his intense disgust, he found his soul back in his body again, and that
+      body spluttering and choking in deep water. The pain of the reunion was
+      atrocious, but it was necessary, also, to fight for the body. He was
+      conscious of grasping wildly at wet sand, and striding prodigiously, as
+      one strides in a dream, to keep foothold in the swirling water, till at
+      last he hauled himself clear of the hold of the river, and dropped,
+      panting, on wet earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not this night,&rdquo; said Peroo, in his ear. &ldquo;The Gods have protected us.&rdquo;
+       The Lascar moved his feet cautiously, and they rustled among dried stumps.
+      &ldquo;This is some island of last year&rsquo;s indigo-crop,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;We shall
+      find no men here; but have great care, Sahib; all the snakes of a hundred
+      miles have been flooded out. Here comes the lightning, on the heels of the
+      wind. Now we shall be able to look; but walk carefully.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Findlayson was far and far beyond any fear of snakes, or indeed any merely
+      human emotion. He saw, after he had rubbed the water from his eyes, with
+      an immense clearness, and trod, so it seemed to himself with
+      world-encompassing strides. Somewhere in the night of time he had built a
+      bridge&mdash;a bridge that spanned illimitable levels of shining seas; but
+      the Deluge had swept it away, leaving this one island under heaven for
+      Findlayson and his companion, sole survivors of the breed of Man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An incessant lightning, forked and blue, showed all that there was to be
+      seen on the little patch in the flood&mdash;a clump of thorn, a clump of
+      swaying creaking bamboos, and a grey gnarled peepul overshadowing a Hindoo
+      shrine, from whose dome floated a tattered red flag. The holy man whose
+      summer resting-place it was had long since abandoned it, and the weather
+      had broken the red-daubed image of his god. The two men stumbled,
+      heavy-limbed and heavy-eyed, over the ashes of a brick-set cooking-place,
+      and dropped down under the shelter of the branches, while the rain and
+      river roared together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The stumps of the indigo crackled, and there was a smell of cattle, as a
+      huge and dripping Brahminee bull shouldered his way under the tree. The
+      flashes revealed the trident mark of Shiva on his flank, the insolence of
+      head and hump, the luminous stag-like eyes, the brow crowned with a wreath
+      of sodden marigold blooms, and the silky dewlap that almost swept the
+      ground. There was a noise behind him of other beasts coming up from the
+      flood-line through the thicket, a sound of heavy feet and deep breathing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here be more beside ourselves,&rdquo; said Findlayson, his head against the
+      treepole, looking through half-shut eyes, wholly at ease.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Truly,&rdquo; said Peroo, thickly, &ldquo;and no small ones.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are they, then? I do not see clearly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Gods. Who else? Look!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, true! The Gods surely&mdash;the Gods.&rdquo; Findlayson smiled as his head
+      fell forward on his chest. Peroo was eminently right. After the Flood, who
+      should be alive in the land except the Gods that made it&mdash;the Gods to
+      whom his village prayed nightly&mdash;the Gods who were in all men&rsquo;s
+      mouths and about all men&rsquo;s ways. He could not raise his head or stir a
+      finger for the trance that held him, and Peroo was smiling vacantly at the
+      lightning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Bull paused by the shrine, his head lowered to the damp earth. A green
+      Parrot in the branches preened his wet wings and screamed against the
+      thunder as the circle under the tree filled with the shifting shadows of
+      beasts. There was a black Buck at the Bull&rsquo;s heels-such a Buck as
+      Findlayson in his far-away life upon earth might have seen in dreams&mdash;a
+      Buck with a royal head, ebon back, silver belly, and gleaming straight
+      horns. Beside him, her head bowed to the ground, the green eyes burning
+      under the heavy brows, with restless tail switching the dead grass, paced
+      a Tigress, full-bellied and deep-jowled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Bull crouched beside the shrine, and there leaped from the darkness a
+      monstrous grey Ape, who seated himself man-wise in the place of the fallen
+      image, and the rain spilled like jewels from the hair of his neck and
+      shoulders. Other shadows came and went behind the circle, among them a
+      drunken Man flourishing staff and drinking-bottle. Then a hoarse bellow
+      broke out from near the ground. &ldquo;The flood lessens even now,&rdquo; it cried.
+      &ldquo;Hour by hour the water falls, and their bridge still stands!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My bridge,&rdquo; said Findlayson to himself &ldquo;That must be very old work now.
+      What have the Gods to do with my bridge?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His eyes rolled in the darkness following the roar. A Mugger&mdash;the
+      blunt-nosed, ford-haunting Mugger of the Ganges&mdash;draggled herself
+      before the beasts, lashing furiously to right and left with her tail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They have made it too strong for me. In all this night I have only torn
+      away a handful of planks. The walls stand. The towers stand. They have
+      chained my flood, and the river is not free any more. Heavenly Ones, take
+      this yoke away! Give me clear water between bank and bank! It is I, Mother
+      Gunga, that speak. The Justice of the Gods! Deal me the Justice of the
+      Gods!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What said I?&rdquo; whispered Peroo. &ldquo;This is in truth a Punchayet of the Gods.
+      Now we know that all the world is dead, save you and I, Sahib.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Parrot screamed and fluttered again, and the Tigress, her ears flat to
+      her head, snarled wickedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Somewhere in the shadow, a great trunk and gleaming tusks swayed to and
+      fro, and a low gurgle broke the silence that followed on the snarl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We be here,&rdquo; said a deep voice, &ldquo;the Great Ones. One only and very many.
+      Shiv, my father, is here, with Indra. Kali has spoken already. Hanuman
+      listens also.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kashi is without her Kotwal to-night,&rdquo; shouted the Man with the
+      drinking-bottle, flinging his staff to the ground, while the island rang
+      to the baying of hounds. &ldquo;Give her the Justice of the Gods.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ye were still when they polluted my waters,&rdquo; the great Crocodile
+      bellowed. &ldquo;Ye made no sign when my river was trapped between the walls. I
+      had no help save my own strength, and that failed&mdash;the strength of
+      Mother Gunga failed&mdash;before their guard-towers. What could I do? I
+      have done everything. Finish now, Heavenly Ones!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I brought the death; I rode the spotted sick-ness from hut to hut of
+      their workmen, and yet they would not cease.&rdquo; A nose-slitten, hide-worn
+      Ass, lame, scissor-legged, and galled, limped forward. &ldquo;I cast the death
+      at them out of my nostrils, but they would not cease.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peroo would have moved, but the opium lay heavy upon him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bah!&rdquo; he said, spitting. &ldquo;Here is Sitala herself; Mata&mdash;the
+      small-pox. Has the Sahib a handkerchief to put over his face?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Little help! They fed me the corpses for a month, and I flung them out on
+      my sand-bars, but their work went forward. Demons they are, and sons of
+      demons! And ye left Mother Gunga alone for their fire-carriage to make a
+      mock of The Justice of the Gods on the bridge-builders!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Bull turned the cud in his mouth and answered slowly: &ldquo;If the Justice
+      of the Gods caught all who made a mock of holy things there would be many
+      dark altars in the land, mother.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But this goes beyond a mock,&rdquo; said the Tigress, darting forward a griping
+      paw. &ldquo;Thou knowest, Shiv, and ye, too, Heavenly Ones; ye know that they
+      have defiled Gunga. Surely they must come to the Destroyer. Let Indra
+      judge.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Buck made no movement as he answered: &ldquo;How long has this evil been?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Three years, as men count years,&rdquo; said the Mugger, close pressed to the
+      earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does Mother Gunga die, then, in a year, that she is so anxious to see
+      vengeance now? The deep sea was where she runs but yesterday, and
+      to-morrow the sea shall cover her again as the Gods count that which men
+      call time. Can any say that this their bridge endures till to-morrow?&rdquo;
+       said the Buck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a long hush, and in the clearing of the storm the full moon
+      stood up above the dripping trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Judge ye, then,&rdquo; said the River, sullenly. &ldquo;I have spoken my shame. The
+      flood falls still. I can do no more.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For my own part,&rdquo;&mdash;it was the voice of the great Ape seated within
+      the shrine&mdash;&ldquo;it pleases me well to watch these men, remembering that
+      I also builded no small bridge in the world&rsquo;s youth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They say, too,&rdquo; snarled the Tiger, &ldquo;that these men came of the wreck of
+      thy armies, Hanuman, and therefore thou hast aided&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They toil as my armies toiled in Lanka, and they believe that their toil
+      endures. Indra is too high, but Shiv, thou knowest how the land is
+      threaded with their fire-carriages.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yea, I know,&rdquo; said the Bull. &ldquo;Their Gods instructed them in the matter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A laugh ran round the circle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Their Gods! What should their Gods know? They were born yesterday, and
+      those that made them are scarcely yet cold,&rdquo; said the Mugger. &ldquo;To-morrow
+      their Gods will die.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ho!&rdquo; said Peroo. &ldquo;Mother Gunga talks good talk. I told that to the
+      padre-sahib who preached on the Mombassa, and he asked the Burra Malum to
+      put me in irons for a great rudeness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Surely they make these things to please their Gods,&rdquo; said the Bull again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not altogether,&rdquo; the Elephant rolled forth. &ldquo;It is for the profit of my
+      mahajuns&mdash;my fat money-lenders that worship me at each new year, when
+      they draw my image at the head of the account-books. I, looking over their
+      shoulders by lamplight, see that the names in the books are those of men
+      in far places&mdash;for all the towns are drawn together by the
+      fire-carriage, and the money comes and goes swiftly, and the account-books
+      grow as fat as&mdash;myself. And I, who am Ganesh of Good Luck, I bless my
+      peoples.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They have changed the face of the land-which is my land. They have killed
+      and made new towns on my banks,&rdquo; said the Mugger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is but the shifting of a little dirt. Let the dirt dig in the dirt if
+      it pleases the dirt,&rdquo; answered the Elephant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But afterwards?&rdquo; said the Tiger. &ldquo;Afterwards they will see that Mother
+      Gunga can avenge no insult, and they fall away from her first, and later
+      from us all, one by one. In the end, Ganesh, we are left with naked
+      altars.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The drunken Man staggered to his feet, and hiccupped vehemently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kali lies. My sister lies. Also this my stick is the Kotwal of Kashi, and
+      he keeps tally of my pilgrims. When the time comes to worship Bhairon-and
+      it is always time&mdash;the fire-carriages move one by one, and each bears
+      a thousand pilgrims. They do not come afoot any more, but rolling upon
+      wheels, and my honour is increased.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gunga, I have seen thy bed at Pryag black with the pilgrims,&rdquo; said the
+      Ape, leaning forward, &ldquo;and but for the fire-carriage they would have come
+      slowly and in fewer numbers. Remember.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They come to me always,&rdquo; Bhairon went on thickly. &ldquo;By day and night they
+      pray to me, all the Common People in the fields and the roads. Who is like
+      Bhairon to-day? What talk is this of changing faiths? Is my staff Kotwal
+      of Kashi for nothing? He keeps the tally, and he says that never were so
+      many altars as today, and the fire-carriage serves them well. Bhairon am I&mdash;Bhairon
+      of the Common People, and the chiefest of the Heavenly Ones to-day. Also
+      my staff says&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peace, thou,&rdquo; lowed the Bull. &ldquo;The worship of the schools is mine, and
+      they talk very wisely, asking whether I be one or many, as is the delight
+      of my people, and ye know what I am. Kali, my wife, thou knowest also.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yea, I know,&rdquo; said the Tigress, with lowered head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Greater am I than Gunga also. For ye know who moved the minds of men that
+      they should count Gunga holy among the rivers. Who die in that water&mdash;ye
+      know how men say&mdash;come to us without punishment, and Gunga knows that
+      the fire-carriage has borne to her scores upon scores of such anxious
+      ones; and Kali knows that she has held her chiefest festivals among the
+      pilgrimages that are fed by the fire-carriage. Who smote at Pooree, under
+      the Image there, her thousands in a day and a night, and bound the
+      sickness to the wheels of the fire-carriages, so that it ran from one end
+      of the land to the other? Who but Kali? Before the fire-carriage came it
+      was a heavy toil. The fire-carriages have served thee well, Mother of
+      Death. But I speak for mine own altars, who am not Bhairon of the Common
+      Folk, but Shiv. Men go to and fro, making words and telling talk of
+      strange Gods, and I listen. Faith follows faith among my people in the
+      schools, and I have no anger; for when all words are said, and the new
+      talk is ended, to Shiv men return at the last.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;True. It is true,&rdquo; murmured Hanuman. &ldquo;To Shiv and to the others, mother,
+      they return. I creep from temple to temple in the North, where they
+      worship one God and His Prophet; and presently my image is alone within
+      their shrines.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Small thanks,&rdquo; said the Buck, turning his head slowly. &ldquo;I am that One and
+      His Prophet also.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Even so, father,&rdquo; said Hanuman. &ldquo;And to the South I go who am the oldest
+      of the Gods as men know the Gods, and presently I touch the shrines of the
+      New Faith and the Woman whom we know is hewn twelve-armed, and still they
+      call her Mary.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Small thanks, brother,&rdquo; said the Tigress. &ldquo;I am that Woman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Even so, sister; and I go West among the fire-carriages, and stand before
+      the bridge-builders in many shapes, and because of me they change their
+      faiths and are very wise. Ho! ho! I am the builder of bridges, indeed&mdash;bridges
+      between this and that, and each bridge leads surely to Us in the end. Be
+      content, Gunga. Neither these men nor those that follow them mock thee at
+      all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Am I alone, then, Heavenly Ones? Shall I smooth out my flood lest
+      unhappily I bear away their walls? Will Indra dry my springs in the hills
+      and make me crawl humbly between their wharfs? Shall I bury me in the sand
+      ere I offend?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And all for the sake of a little iron bar with the fire-carriage atop.
+      Truly, Mother Gunga is always young!&rdquo; said Ganesh the Elephant. &ldquo;A child
+      had not spoken more foolishly. Let the dirt dig in the dirt ere it return
+      to the dirt. I know only that my people grow rich and praise me. Shiv has
+      said that the men of the schools do not forget; Bhairon is content for his
+      crowd of the Common People; and Hanuman laughs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Surely I laugh,&rdquo; said the Ape. &ldquo;My altars are few beside those of Ganesh
+      or Bhairon, but the fire-carriages bring me new worshippers from beyond
+      the Black Water&mdash;the men who believe that their God is toil. I run
+      before them beckoning, and they follow Hanuman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give them the toil that they desire, then,&rdquo; said the River. &ldquo;Make a bar
+      across my flood and throw the water back upon the bridge. Once thou wast
+      strong in Lanka, Hanuman. Stoop and lift my bed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who gives life can take life.&rdquo; The Ape scratched in the mud with a long
+      forefinger. &ldquo;And yet, who would profit by the killing? Very many would
+      die.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There came up from the water a snatch of a love-song such as the boys sing
+      when they watch their cattle in the noon heats of late spring. The Parrot
+      screamed joyously, sidling along his branch with lowered head as the song
+      grew louder, and in a patch of clear moonlight stood revealed the young
+      herd, the darling of the Gopis, the idol of dreaming maids and of mothers
+      ere their children are born Krishna the Well-beloved. He stooped to knot
+      up his long wet hair, and the Parrot fluttered to his shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fleeting and singing, and singing and fleeting,&rdquo; hiccupped Bhairon.
+      &ldquo;Those make thee late for the council, brother.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And then?&rdquo; said Krishna, with a laugh, throwing back his head. &ldquo;Ye can do
+      little without me or Karma here.&rdquo; He fondled the Parrot&rsquo;s plumage and
+      laughed again. &ldquo;What is this sitting and talking together? I heard Mother
+      Gunga roaring in the dark, and so came quickly from a hut where I lay
+      warm. And what have ye done to Karma, that he is so wet and silent? And
+      what does Mother Gunga here? Are the heavens full that ye must come
+      paddling in the mud beast-wise? Karma, what do they do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gunga has prayed for a vengeance on the bridge-builders, and Kali is with
+      her. Now she bids Hanuman whelm the bridge, that her honour may be made
+      great,&rdquo; cried the Parrot. &ldquo;I waited here, knowing that thou wouldst come,
+      O my master!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the Heavenly Ones said nothing? Did Gunga and the Mother of Sorrows
+      out-talk them? Did none speak for my people?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay,&rdquo; said Ganesh, moving uneasily from foot to foot; &ldquo;I said it was but
+      dirt at play, and why should we stamp it flat?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was content to let them toil&mdash;well content,&rdquo; said Hanuman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What had I to do with Gunga&rsquo;s anger?&rdquo; said the Bull.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am Bhairon of the Common Folk, and this my staff is Kotwal of all
+      Kashi. I spoke for the Common People.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thou?&rdquo; The young God&rsquo;s eyes sparkled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Am I not the first of the Gods in their mouths to-day?&rdquo; returned Bhairon,
+      unabashed. &ldquo;For the sake of the Common People I said&mdash;very many wise
+      things which I have now forgotten, but this my staff-&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Krishna turned impatiently, saw the Mugger at his feet, and kneeling,
+      slipped an arm round the cold neck. &ldquo;Mother,&rdquo; he said gently, &ldquo;get thee to
+      thy flood again. The matter is not for thee. What harm shall thy honour
+      take of this live dirt? Thou hast given them their fields new year after
+      year, and by thy flood they are made strong. They come all to thee at the
+      last. What need to slay them now? Have pity, mother, for a little&mdash;and
+      it is only for a little.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If it be only for a little,&rdquo; the slow beast began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are they Gods, then?&rdquo; Krishna returned with a laugh, his eyes looking
+      into the dull eyes of the River. &ldquo;Be certain that it is only for a little.
+      The Heavenly Ones have heard thee, and presently justice will be done. Go
+      now, mother, to the flood again. Men and cattle are thick on the waters&mdash;the
+      banks fall&mdash;the villages melt because of thee.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the bridge&mdash;the bridge stands.&rdquo; The Mugger turned grunting into
+      the undergrowth as Krishna rose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is ended,&rdquo; said the Tigress, viciously. &ldquo;There is no more justice from
+      the Heavenly Ones. Ye have made shame and sport of Gunga, who asked no
+      more than a few score lives.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of my people&mdash;who lie under the leaf-roofs of the village yonder&mdash;of
+      the young girls, and the young men who sing to them in the dark&mdash;of
+      the child that will be born next morn&mdash;of that which was begotten
+      to-night,&rdquo; said Krishna. &ldquo;And when all is done, what profit? To-morrow
+      sees them at work. Ay, if ye swept the bridge out from end to end they
+      would begin anew. Hear me! Bhairon is drunk always. Hanuman mocks his
+      people with new riddles.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, but they are very old ones,&rdquo; the Ape said, laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shiv hears the talk of the schools and the dreams of the holy men; Ganesh
+      thinks only of his fat traders; but I&mdash;I live with these my people,
+      asking for no gifts, and so receiving them hourly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And very tender art thou of thy people,&rdquo; said the Tigress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are my own. The old women dream of me turning in their sleep; the
+      maids look and listen for me when they go to fill their lotahs by the
+      river. I walk by the young men waiting without the gates at dusk, and I
+      call over my shoulder to the white-beards. Ye know, Heavenly Ones, that I
+      alone of us all walk upon the earth continually, and have no pleasure in
+      our heavens so long as a green blade springs here, or there are two voices
+      at twilight in the standing crops. Wise are ye, but ye live far off;
+      forgetting whence ye came. So do I not forget. And the fire-carriage feeds
+      your shrines, ye say? And the fire-carriages bring a thousand pilgrims
+      where but ten came in the old years? True. That is true, to-day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But to-morrow they are dead, brother,&rdquo; said Ganesh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peace!&rdquo; said the Bull, as Hanuman leaned forward again. &ldquo;And to-morrow,
+      beloved&mdash;what of to-morrow?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This only. A new word creeping from mouth to mouth among the Common Folk&mdash;a
+      word that neither man nor God can lay hold of&mdash;an evil word&mdash;a
+      little lazy word among the Common Folk, saying (and none know who set that
+      word afoot) that they weary of ye, Heavenly Ones.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Gods laughed together softly. &ldquo;And then, beloved,&rdquo; they said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And to cover that weariness they, my people, will bring to thee, Shiv,
+      and to thee, Ganesh, at first greater offerings and a louder noise of
+      worship. But the word has gone abroad, and, after, they will pay fewer
+      dues to your fat Brahmins. Next they will forget your altars, but so
+      slowly that no man can say how his forgetfulness began.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I knew&mdash;I knew! I spoke this also, but they would not hear,&rdquo; said
+      the Tigress. &ldquo;We should have slain-we should have slain!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is too late now. Ye should have slain at the beginning when the men
+      from across the water had taught our folk nothing. Now my people see their
+      work, and go away thinking. They do not think of the Heavenly Ones
+      altogether. They think of the fire-carriage and the other things that the
+      bridge-builders have done, and when your priests thrust forward hands
+      asking alms, they give a little unwillingly. That is the beginning, among
+      one or two, or five or ten&mdash;for I, moving among my people, know what
+      is in their hearts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the end, Jester of the Gods? What shall the end be?&rdquo; said Ganesh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The end shall be as it was in the beginning, O slothful son of Shiv! The
+      flame shall die upon the altars and the prayer upon the tongue till ye
+      become little Gods again&mdash;Gods of the jungle&mdash;names that the
+      hunters of rats and noosers of dogs whisper in the thicket and among the
+      caves&mdash;rag-Gods, pot Godlings of the tree, and the village-mark, as
+      ye were at the beginning. That is the end, Ganesh, for thee, and for
+      Bhairon&mdash;Bhairon of the Common People.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is very far away,&rdquo; grunted Bhairon. &ldquo;Also, it is a lie.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Many women have kissed Krishna. They told him this to cheer their own
+      hearts when the grey hairs came, and he has told us the tale,&rdquo; said the
+      Bull, below his breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Their Gods came, and we changed them. I took the Woman and made her
+      twelve-armed. So shall we twist all their Gods,&rdquo; said Hanuman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Their Gods! This is no question of their Gods&mdash;one or three&mdash;man
+      or woman. The matter is with the people. I move, and not the Gods of the
+      bridge-builders,&rdquo; said Krishna.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So be it. I have made a man worship the fire-carriage as it stood still
+      breathing smoke, and he knew not that he worshipped me,&rdquo; said Hanuman the
+      Ape. &ldquo;They will only change a little the names of their Gods. I shall lead
+      the builders of the bridges as of old; Shiv shall be worshipped in the
+      schools by such as doubt and despise their fellows; Ganesh shall have his
+      mahajuns, and Bhairon the donkey-drivers, the pilgrims, and the sellers of
+      toys. Beloved, they will do no more than change the names, and that we
+      have seen a thousand times.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Surely they will do no more than change the names,&rdquo; echoed Ganesh; but
+      there was an uneasy movement among the Gods.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They will change more than the names. Me alone they cannot kill, so long
+      as a maiden and a man meet together or the spring follows the winter
+      rains. Heavenly Ones, not for nothing have I walked upon the earth. My
+      people know not now what they know; but I, who live with them, I read
+      their hearts. Great Kings, the beginning of the end is born already. The
+      fire-carriages shout the names of new Gods that are not the old under new
+      names. Drink now and eat greatly! Bathe your faces in the smoke of the
+      altars before they grow cold! Take dues and listen to the cymbals and the
+      drums, Heavenly Ones, while yet there are flowers and songs. As men count
+      time the end is far off; but as we who know reckon it is to-day. I have
+      spoken.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young God ceased, and his brethren looked at each other long in
+      silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This I have not heard before,&rdquo; Peroo whispered in his companion&rsquo;s ear.
+      &ldquo;And yet sometimes, when I oiled the brasses in the engine-room of the
+      Goorkha, I have wondered if our priests were so wise&mdash;so wise. The
+      day is coming, Sahib. They will be gone by the morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A yellow light broadened in the sky, and the tone of the river changed as
+      the darkness withdrew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly the Elephant trumpeted aloud as though man had goaded him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let Indra judge. Father of all, speak thou! What of the things we have
+      heard? Has Krishna lied indeed? Or&mdash;-&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ye know,&rdquo; said the Buck, rising to his feet. &ldquo;Ye know the Riddle of the
+      Gods. When Brahm ceases to dream, the Heavens and the Hells and Earth
+      disappear. Be content. Brahm dreams still. The dreams come and go, and the
+      nature of the dreams changes, but still Brahm dreams. Krishna has walked
+      too long upon earth, and yet I love him the more for the tale he has told.
+      The Gods change, beloved&mdash;all save One!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ay, all save one that makes love in the hearts of men,&rdquo; said Krishna,
+      knotting his girdle. &ldquo;It is but a little time to wait, and ye shall know
+      if I lie. Truly it is but a little time, as thou sayest, and we shall
+      know. Get thee to thy huts again, beloved, and make sport for the young
+      things, for still Brahm dreams. Go, my children! Brahm dreams and till he
+      wakes the Gods die not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whither went they?&rdquo; said the Lascar, awe-struck, shivering a little with
+      the cold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God knows!&rdquo; said Findlayson. The river and the island lay in full
+      daylight now, and there was never mark of hoof or pug on the wet earth
+      under the peepul. Only a parrot screamed in the branches, bringing down
+      showers of water-drops as he fluttered his wings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Up! We are cramped with cold! Has the opium died out. Canst thou move,
+      Sahib?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Findlayson staggered to his feet and shook himself. His bead swam and
+      ached, but the work of the opium was over, and, as he sluiced his forehead
+      in a pool, the Chief Engineer of the Kashi Bridge was wondering how he had
+      managed to fall upon the island, what chances the day offered of return,
+      and, above all, how his work stood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peroo, I have forgotten much I was under the guard-tower watching the
+      river; and then&mdash;Did the flood sweep us away?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. The boats broke loose, Sahib, and,&rdquo; (if the Sahib had forgotten about
+      the opium, decidedly Peroo would not remind him) &ldquo;in striving to retie
+      them, so it seemed to me but it was dark&mdash;a rope caught the Sahib and
+      threw him upon a boat. Considering that we two, with Hitchcock Sahib,
+      built, as it were, that bridge, I came also upon the boat, which came
+      riding on horseback, as it were, on the nose of this island, and so,
+      splitting, cast us ashore. I made a great cry when the boat left the wharf
+      and without doubt Hitchcock Sahib will come for us. As for the bridge, so
+      many have died in the building that it cannot fall.&rdquo; A fierce sun, that
+      drew out all the smell of the sodden land, had followed the storm, and in
+      that clear light there was no room for a man to think of the dreams of the
+      dark. Findlayson stared upstream, across the blaze of moving water, till
+      his eyes ached. There was no sign of any bank to the Ganges, much less of
+      a bridge-line.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We came down far,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It was wonderful that we were not drowned a
+      hundred times.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was the least of the wonder, for no man dies before his time. I have
+      seen Sydney, I have seen London, and twenty great ports, but,&rdquo;&mdash;Peroo
+      looked at the damp, discoloured shrine under the peepul&mdash;&ldquo;never man
+      has seen that we saw here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has the Sahib forgotten; or do we black men only see the Gods?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was a fever upon me.&rdquo; Findlayson was still looking uneasily across
+      the water. &ldquo;It seemed that the island was full of beasts and men talking,
+      but I do not remember. A boat could live in this water now, I think.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oho! Then it is true. &lsquo;When Brahm ceases to dream, the Gods die.&rsquo; Now I
+      know, indeed, what he meant. Once, too, the guru said as much to me; but
+      then I did not understand. Now I am wise.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What?&rdquo; said Findlayson, over his shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Peroo went on as if he were talking to himself &ldquo;Six&mdash;seven&mdash;ten
+      monsoons since, I was watch on the fo&rsquo;c&rsquo;sle of the Rewah&mdash;the
+      Kumpani&rsquo;s big boat&mdash;and there was a big tufan; green and black water
+      beating, and I held fast to the life-lines, choking under the waters. Then
+      I thought of the Gods&mdash;of Those whom we saw to-night,&rdquo;&mdash;he
+      stared curiously at Findlayson&rsquo;s back, but the white man was looking
+      across the flood. &ldquo;Yes, I say of Those whom we saw this night past, and I
+      called upon Them to protect me. And while I prayed, still keeping my
+      lookout, a big wave came and threw me forward upon the ring of the great
+      black bow-anchor, and the Rewah rose high and high, leaning towards the
+      left-hand side, and the water drew away from beneath her nose, and I lay
+      upon my belly, holding the ring, and looking down into those great deeps.
+      Then I thought, even in the face of death: If I lose hold I die, and for
+      me neither the Rewah nor my place by the galley where the rice is cooked,
+      nor Bombay, nor Calcutta, nor even London, will be any more for me. &lsquo;How
+      shall I be sure,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;that the Gods to whom I pray will abide at
+      all?&rsquo; This I thought, and the Rewah dropped her nose as a hammer falls,
+      and all the sea came in and slid me backwards along the fo&rsquo;c&rsquo;sle and over
+      the break of the fo&rsquo;c&rsquo;sle, and I very badly bruised my shin against the
+      donkey-engine: but I did not die, and I have seen the Gods. They are good
+      for live men, but for the dead. . . . They have spoken Themselves.
+      Therefore, when I come to the village I will beat the guru for talking
+      riddles which are no riddles. When Brahm ceases to dream the Gods go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look up-stream. The light blinds. Is there smoke yonder?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peroo shaded his eyes with his hands. &ldquo;He is a wise man and quick.
+      Hitchcock Sahib would not trust a rowboat. He has borrowed the Rao Sahib&rsquo;s
+      steam-launch, and comes to look for us. I have always said that there
+      should have been a steam-launch on the bridge works for us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The territory of the Rao of Baraon lay within ten miles of the bridge; and
+      Findlayson and Hitchcock had spent a fair portion of their scanty leisure
+      in playing billiards and shooting blackbuck with the young man. He had
+      been bearded by an English tutor of sporting tastes for some five or six
+      years, and was now royally wasting the revenues accumulated during his
+      minority by the Indian Government. His steam-launch, with its
+      silver-plated rails, striped silk awning, and mahogany decks, was a new
+      toy which Findlayson had found horribly in the way when the Rao came to
+      look at the bridge works.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s great luck,&rdquo; murmured Findlayson, but he was none the less afraid,
+      wondering what news might be of the bridge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The gaudy blue-and-white funnel came downstream swiftly. They could see
+      Hitchcock in the bows, with a pair of opera-glasses, and his face was
+      unusually white. Then Peroo hailed, and the launch made for the tail of
+      the island. The Rao Sahib, in tweed shooting-suit and a seven-hued turban,
+      waved his royal hand, and Hitchcock shouted. But he need have asked no
+      questions, for Findlayson&rsquo;s first demand was for his bridge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All serene! &lsquo;Gad, I never expected to see you again, Findlayson. You&rsquo;re
+      seven koss downstream. Yes; there&rsquo;s not a stone shifted anywhere; but how
+      are you? I borrowed the Rao Sahib&rsquo;s launch, and he was good enough to come
+      along. Jump in. Ah, Finlinson, you are very well, eh? That was most
+      unprecedented calamity last night, eh? My royal palace, too, it leaks like
+      the devil, and the crops will also be short all about my country. Now you
+      shall back her out, Hitchcock. I&mdash;I do not understand steam-engines.
+      You are wet? You are cold, Finlinson? I have some things to eat here, and
+      you will take a good drink.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m immensely grateful, Rao Sahib. I believe you&rsquo;ve saved my life. How
+      did Hitchcock&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oho! His hair was upon end. He rode to me in the middle of the night and
+      woke me up in the arms of Morpheus. I was most truly concerned, Finlinson,
+      so I came too. My head-priest he is very angry just now. We will go quick,
+      Mister Hitchcock. I am due to attend at twelve forty-five in the state
+      temple, where we sanctify some new idol. If not so I would have asked you
+      to spend the day with me. They are dam-bore, these religious ceremonies,
+      Finlinson, eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Peroo, well known to the crew, had possessed himself of the inlaid wheel,
+      and was taking the launch craftily up-stream. But while he steered he was,
+      in his mind, handling two feet of partially untwisted wire-rope; and the
+      back upon which he beat was the back of his guru.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
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+</pre>
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+</html>
diff --git a/2163.txt b/2163.txt
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--- /dev/null
+++ b/2163.txt
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Bridge-Builders, by Rudyard Kipling
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Bridge-Builders
+
+Author: Rudyard Kipling
+
+Release Date: February 25, 2006 [EBook #2163]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BRIDGE-BUILDERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Bill Stoddard and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+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.
+
+A shrill wail ran along the line, growing to a yell, half fear and half
+wonder: the face of the river whitened from bank to hank between the
+stone facings, and the far-away spurs went out in spouts of foam. Mother
+Gunga had come bank-high in haste, and a wall of chocolate-coloured
+water was her messenger. There was a shriek above the roar of the water,
+the complaint of the spans coming down on their blocks as the cribs were
+whirled out from under their bellies. The stone-boats groaned and ground
+each other in the eddy that swung round the abutment, and their clumsy
+masts rose higher and higher against the dim sky-line.
+
+"Before she was shut between these walls we knew what she would do.
+Now she is thus cramped God only knows what she will do!" said Peroo,
+watching the furious turmoil round the guard-tower. "Ohe'! Fight, then!
+Fight hard, for it is thus that a woman wears herself out."
+
+But Mother Gunga would not fight as Peroo desired. After the first
+down-stream plunge there came no more walls of water, but the river
+lifted herself bodily, as a snake when she drinks in midsummer, plucking
+and fingering along the revetments, and banking up behind the piers till
+even Findlayson began to recalculate the strength of his work.
+
+When day came the village gasped. "Only last night," men said, turning
+to each other, "it was as a town in the river-bed! Look now!"
+
+And they looked and wondered afresh at the deep water, the racing water
+that licked the throat of the piers. The farther bank was veiled by
+rain, into which the bridge ran out and vanished; the spurs up-stream
+were marked by no more than eddies and spoutings, and down-stream the
+pent river, once freed of her guide-lines, had spread like a sea to
+the horizon. Then hurried by, rolling in the water, dead men and oxen
+together, with here and there a patch of thatched roof that melted when
+it touched a pier.
+
+"Big flood," said Peroo, and Findlayson nodded. It was as big a flood as
+he had any wish to watch. His bridge would stand what was upon her
+now, but not very much more, and if by any of a thousand chances there
+happened to be a weakness in the embankments, Mother Gunga would carry
+his honour to the sea with the other raffle. Worst of all, there was
+nothing to do except to sit still; and Findlayson sat still under his
+macintosh till his helmet became pulp on his head, and his boots were
+over-ankle in mire. He took no count of time, for the river was marking
+the hours, inch by inch and foot by foot, along the embankment, and
+he listened, numb and hungry, to the straining of the stone-boats, the
+hollow thunder under the piers, and the hundred noises that make the
+full note of a flood. Once a dripping servant brought him food, but he
+could not eat; and once he thought that he heard a faint toot from a
+locomotive across the river, and then he smiled. The bridge's failure
+would hurt his assistant not a little, but Hitchcock was a young
+man with his big work yet to do. For himself the crash meant
+everything--everything that made a hard life worth the living. They
+would say, the men of his own profession . . . he remembered the
+half-pitying things that he himself had said when Lockhart's new
+waterworks burst and broke down in brick-heaps and sludge, and
+Lockhart's spirit broke in him and he died. He remembered what he
+himself had said when the Sumao Bridge went out in the big cyclone by
+the sea; and most he remembered poor Hartopp's face three weeks
+later, when the shame had marked it. His bridge was twice the size
+of Hartopp's, and it carried the Findlayson truss as well as the new
+pier-shoe--the Findlayson bolted shoe. There were no excuses in his
+service. Government might listen, perhaps, but his own kind would judge
+him by his bridge, as that stood or fell. He went over it in his head,
+plate by plate, span by span, brick by brick, pier by pier, remembering,
+comparing, estimating, and recalculating, lest there should be any
+mistake; and through the long hours and through the flights of formulae
+that danced and wheeled before him a cold fear would come to pinch his
+heart. His side of the sum was beyond question; but what man knew Mother
+Gunga's arithmetic? Even as he was making all sure by the multiplication
+table, the river might be scooping a pot-hole to the very bottom of
+any one of those eighty-foot piers that carried his reputation. Again a
+servant came to him with food, but his mouth was dry, and he could only
+drink and return to the decimals in his brain. And the river was still
+rising. Peroo, in a mat shelter coat, crouched at his feet, watching now
+his face and now the face of the river, but saying nothing.
+
+At last the Lascar rose and floundered through the mud towards the
+village, but he was careful to leave an ally to watch the boats.
+
+Presently he returned, most irreverently driving before him the priest
+of his creed--a fat old man, with a grey beard that whipped the wind
+with the wet cloth that blew over his shoulder. Never was seen so
+lamentable a guru.
+
+"What good are offerings and little kerosene lamps and dry grain,"
+shouted Peroo, "if squatting in the mud is all that thou canst do? Thou
+hast dealt long with the Gods when they were contented and well-wishing.
+Now they are angry. Speak to them!"
+
+"What is a man against the wrath of Gods?" whined the priest, cowering
+as the wind took him. "Let me go to the temple, and I will pray there."
+
+"Son of a pig, pray here! Is there no return for salt fish and curry
+powder and dried onions? Call aloud! Tell Mother Gunga we have had
+enough. Bid her be still for the night. I cannot pray, but I have been
+serving in the Kumpani's boats, and when men did not obey my orders I--"
+A flourish of the wire-rope colt rounded the sentence, and the priest,
+breaking free from his disciple, fled to the village.
+
+"Fat pig!" said Peroo. "After all that we have done for him! When the
+flood is down I will see to it that we get a new guru. Finlinson Sahib,
+it darkens for night now, and since yesterday nothing has been eaten. Be
+wise, Sahib. No man can endure watching and great thinking on an empty
+belly. Lie down, Sahib. The river will do what the river will do."
+
+"The bridge is mine; I cannot leave it."
+
+"Wilt thou hold it up with thy hands, then?" said Peroo, laughing.
+
+"I was troubled for my boats and sheers before the flood came. Now we
+are in the hands of the Gods. The Sahib will not eat and lie down? Take
+these, then. They are meat and good toddy together, and they kill all
+weariness, besides the fever that follows the rain. I have eaten nothing
+else to-day at all."
+
+He took a small tin tobacco-box from his sodden waist-belt and thrust
+it into Findlayson's hand, saying: "Nay, do not be afraid. It is no more
+than opium--clean Malwa opium."
+
+Findlayson shook two or three of the dark-brown pellets into his hand,
+and hardly knowing what he did, swallowed them. The stuff was at least
+a good guard against fever--the fever that was creeping upon him out of
+the wet mud--and he had seen what Peroo could do in the stewing mists of
+autumn on the strength of a dose from the tin box.
+
+Peroo nodded with bright eyes. "In a little--in a little the Sahib
+will find that he thinks well again. I too will--" He dived into his
+treasure-box, resettled the rain-coat over his head, and squatted down
+to watch the boats. It was too dark now to see beyond the first pier,
+and the night seemed to have given the river new strength. Findlayson
+stood with his chin on his chest, thinking. There was one point about
+one of the piers--the seventh--that he had not fully settled in his
+mind. The figures would not shape themselves to the eye except one by
+one and at enormous intervals of time. There was a sound rich and mellow
+in his ears like the deepest note of a double-bass--an entrancing sound
+upon which he pondered for several hours, as it seemed. Then Peroo
+was at his elbow, shouting that a wire hawser had snapped and the
+stone-boats were loose. Findlayson saw the fleet open and swing out
+fanwise to a long-drawn shriek of wire straining across gunnels.
+
+"A tree hit them. They will all go," cried Peroo. "The main hawser has
+parted. What does the Sahib do?"
+
+An immensely complex plan had suddenly flashed into Findlayson's
+mind. He saw the ropes running from boat to boat in straight lines and
+angles--each rope a line of white fire. But there was one rope which was
+the master rope. He could see that rope. If he could pull it once, it
+was absolutely and mathematically certain that the disordered fleet
+would reassemble itself in the backwater behind the guard-tower. But
+why, he wondered, was Peroo clinging so desperately to his waist as he
+hastened down the bank? It was necessary to put the Lascar aside, gently
+and slowly, because it was necessary to save the boats, and, further,
+to demonstrate the extreme ease of the problem that looked so difficult.
+And then--but it was of no conceivable importance--a wire-rope raced
+through his hand, burning it, the high bank disappeared, and with it
+all the slowly dispersing factors of the problem. He was sitting in the
+rainy darkness--sitting in a boat that spun like a top, and Peroo was
+standing over him.
+
+"I had forgotten," said the Lascar, slowly, "that to those fasting and
+unused, the opium is worse than any wine. Those who die in Gunga go to
+the Gods. Still, I have no desire to present myself before such great
+ones. Can the Sahib swim?"
+
+"What need? He can fly--fly as swiftly as the wind," was the thick
+answer.
+
+"He is mad!" muttered Peroo, under his breath. "And he threw me aside
+like a bundle of dung-cakes. Well, he will not know his death. The boat
+cannot live an hour here even if she strike nothing. It is not good to
+look at death with a clear eye."
+
+He refreshed himself again from the tin box, squatted down in the bows
+of the reeling, pegged, and stitched craft, staring through the mist at
+the nothing that was there. A warm drowsiness crept over Findlayson,
+the Chief Engineer, whose duty was with his bridge. The heavy raindrops
+struck him with a thousand tingling little thrills, and the weight of
+all time since time was made hung heavy on his eyelids. He thought and
+perceived that he was perfectly secure, for the water was so solid that
+a man could surely step out upon it, and, standing still with his legs
+apart to keep his balance--this was the most important point--would be
+borne with great and easy speed to the shore. But yet a better plan came
+to him. It needed only an exertion of will for the soul to hurl the
+body ashore as wind drives paper, to waft it kite-fashion to the bank.
+Thereafter--the boat spun dizzily--suppose the high wind got under the
+freed body? Would it tower up like a kite and pitch headlong on the
+far-away sands, or would it duck about, beyond control, through all
+eternity? Findlayson gripped the gunnel to anchor himself, for it seemed
+that he was on the edge of taking the flight before he had settled all
+his plans. Opium has more effect on the white man than the black. Peroo
+was only comfortably indifferent to accidents. "She cannot live," he
+grunted. "Her seams open already. If she were even a dinghy with oars
+we could have ridden it out; but a box with holes is no good. Finlinson
+Sahib, she fills."
+
+"Accha! I am going away. Come thou also." In his mind, Findlayson had
+already escaped from the boat, and was circling high in air to find a
+rest for the sole of his foot. His body--he was really sorry for its
+gross helplessness--lay in the stern, the water rushing about its knees.
+
+"How very ridiculous!" he said to himself from his eyrie--"that--is
+Findlayson--chief of the Kashi Bridge. The poor beast is going to
+be drowned, too. Drowned when it's close to shore. I'm--I'm on shore
+already. Why doesn't it come along?"
+
+To his intense disgust, he found his soul back in his body again, and
+that body spluttering and choking in deep water. The pain of the reunion
+was atrocious, but it was necessary, also, to fight for the body. He was
+conscious of grasping wildly at wet sand, and striding prodigiously, as
+one strides in a dream, to keep foothold in the swirling water, till
+at last he hauled himself clear of the hold of the river, and dropped,
+panting, on wet earth.
+
+"Not this night," said Peroo, in his ear. "The Gods have protected
+us." The Lascar moved his feet cautiously, and they rustled among dried
+stumps. "This is some island of last year's indigo-crop," he went on.
+"We shall find no men here; but have great care, Sahib; all the snakes
+of a hundred miles have been flooded out. Here comes the lightning,
+on the heels of the wind. Now we shall be able to look; but walk
+carefully."
+
+Findlayson was far and far beyond any fear of snakes, or indeed any
+merely human emotion. He saw, after he had rubbed the water from his
+eyes, with an immense clearness, and trod, so it seemed to himself with
+world-encompassing strides. Somewhere in the night of time he had built
+a bridge--a bridge that spanned illimitable levels of shining seas; but
+the Deluge had swept it away, leaving this one island under heaven for
+Findlayson and his companion, sole survivors of the breed of Man.
+
+An incessant lightning, forked and blue, showed all that there was to
+be seen on the little patch in the flood--a clump of thorn, a clump
+of swaying creaking bamboos, and a grey gnarled peepul overshadowing a
+Hindoo shrine, from whose dome floated a tattered red flag. The holy man
+whose summer resting-place it was had long since abandoned it, and
+the weather had broken the red-daubed image of his god. The two men
+stumbled, heavy-limbed and heavy-eyed, over the ashes of a brick-set
+cooking-place, and dropped down under the shelter of the branches, while
+the rain and river roared together.
+
+The stumps of the indigo crackled, and there was a smell of cattle, as a
+huge and dripping Brahminee bull shouldered his way under the tree. The
+flashes revealed the trident mark of Shiva on his flank, the insolence
+of head and hump, the luminous stag-like eyes, the brow crowned with a
+wreath of sodden marigold blooms, and the silky dewlap that almost swept
+the ground. There was a noise behind him of other beasts coming up
+from the flood-line through the thicket, a sound of heavy feet and deep
+breathing.
+
+"Here be more beside ourselves," said Findlayson, his head against the
+treepole, looking through half-shut eyes, wholly at ease.
+
+"Truly," said Peroo, thickly, "and no small ones."
+
+"What are they, then? I do not see clearly."
+
+"The Gods. Who else? Look!"
+
+"Ah, true! The Gods surely--the Gods." Findlayson smiled as his head
+fell forward on his chest. Peroo was eminently right. After the Flood,
+who should be alive in the land except the Gods that made it--the Gods
+to whom his village prayed nightly--the Gods who were in all men's
+mouths and about all men's ways. He could not raise his head or stir a
+finger for the trance that held him, and Peroo was smiling vacantly at
+the lightning.
+
+The Bull paused by the shrine, his head lowered to the damp earth. A
+green Parrot in the branches preened his wet wings and screamed against
+the thunder as the circle under the tree filled with the shifting
+shadows of beasts. There was a black Buck at the Bull's heels-such a
+Buck as Findlayson in his far-away life upon earth might have seen in
+dreams--a Buck with a royal head, ebon back, silver belly, and gleaming
+straight horns. Beside him, her head bowed to the ground, the green eyes
+burning under the heavy brows, with restless tail switching the dead
+grass, paced a Tigress, full-bellied and deep-jowled.
+
+The Bull crouched beside the shrine, and there leaped from the darkness
+a monstrous grey Ape, who seated himself man-wise in the place of the
+fallen image, and the rain spilled like jewels from the hair of his neck
+and shoulders. Other shadows came and went behind the circle, among
+them a drunken Man flourishing staff and drinking-bottle. Then a hoarse
+bellow broke out from near the ground. "The flood lessens even now," it
+cried. "Hour by hour the water falls, and their bridge still stands!"
+
+"My bridge," said Findlayson to himself "That must be very old work now.
+What have the Gods to do with my bridge?"
+
+His eyes rolled in the darkness following the roar. A Mugger--the
+blunt-nosed, ford-haunting Mugger of the Ganges--draggled herself before
+the beasts, lashing furiously to right and left with her tail.
+
+"They have made it too strong for me. In all this night I have only torn
+away a handful of planks. The walls stand. The towers stand. They have
+chained my flood, and the river is not free any more. Heavenly Ones,
+take this yoke away! Give me clear water between bank and bank! It is I,
+Mother Gunga, that speak. The Justice of the Gods! Deal me the Justice
+of the Gods!"
+
+"What said I?" whispered Peroo. "This is in truth a Punchayet of the
+Gods. Now we know that all the world is dead, save you and I, Sahib."
+
+The Parrot screamed and fluttered again, and the Tigress, her ears flat
+to her head, snarled wickedly.
+
+Somewhere in the shadow, a great trunk and gleaming tusks swayed to and
+fro, and a low gurgle broke the silence that followed on the snarl.
+
+"We be here," said a deep voice, "the Great Ones. One only and very
+many. Shiv, my father, is here, with Indra. Kali has spoken already.
+Hanuman listens also."
+
+"Kashi is without her Kotwal to-night," shouted the Man with the
+drinking-bottle, flinging his staff to the ground, while the island rang
+to the baying of hounds. "Give her the Justice of the Gods."
+
+"Ye were still when they polluted my waters," the great Crocodile
+bellowed. "Ye made no sign when my river was trapped between the walls.
+I had no help save my own strength, and that failed--the strength of
+Mother Gunga failed--before their guard-towers. What could I do? I have
+done everything. Finish now, Heavenly Ones!"
+
+"I brought the death; I rode the spotted sick-ness from hut to hut of
+their workmen, and yet they would not cease." A nose-slitten, hide-worn
+Ass, lame, scissor-legged, and galled, limped forward. "I cast the death
+at them out of my nostrils, but they would not cease."
+
+Peroo would have moved, but the opium lay heavy upon him.
+
+"Bah!" he said, spitting. "Here is Sitala herself; Mata--the small-pox.
+Has the Sahib a handkerchief to put over his face?"
+
+"Little help! They fed me the corpses for a month, and I flung them out
+on my sand-bars, but their work went forward. Demons they are, and sons
+of demons! And ye left Mother Gunga alone for their fire-carriage to
+make a mock of The Justice of the Gods on the bridge-builders!"
+
+The Bull turned the cud in his mouth and answered slowly: "If the
+Justice of the Gods caught all who made a mock of holy things there
+would be many dark altars in the land, mother."
+
+"But this goes beyond a mock," said the Tigress, darting forward a
+griping paw. "Thou knowest, Shiv, and ye, too, Heavenly Ones; ye know
+that they have defiled Gunga. Surely they must come to the Destroyer.
+Let Indra judge."
+
+The Buck made no movement as he answered: "How long has this evil been?
+
+"Three years, as men count years," said the Mugger, close pressed to the
+earth.
+
+"Does Mother Gunga die, then, in a year, that she is so anxious to
+see vengeance now? The deep sea was where she runs but yesterday, and
+to-morrow the sea shall cover her again as the Gods count that which men
+call time. Can any say that this their bridge endures till to-morrow?"
+said the Buck.
+
+There was a long hush, and in the clearing of the storm the full moon
+stood up above the dripping trees.
+
+"Judge ye, then," said the River, sullenly. "I have spoken my shame. The
+flood falls still. I can do no more."
+
+"For my own part,"--it was the voice of the great Ape seated within the
+shrine--"it pleases me well to watch these men, remembering that I also
+builded no small bridge in the world's youth."
+
+"They say, too," snarled the Tiger, "that these men came of the wreck of
+thy armies, Hanuman, and therefore thou hast aided--"
+
+"They toil as my armies toiled in Lanka, and they believe that their
+toil endures. Indra is too high, but Shiv, thou knowest how the land is
+threaded with their fire-carriages."
+
+"Yea, I know," said the Bull. "Their Gods instructed them in the
+matter."
+
+A laugh ran round the circle.
+
+"Their Gods! What should their Gods know? They were born yesterday, and
+those that made them are scarcely yet cold," said the Mugger. "To-morrow
+their Gods will die."
+
+"Ho!" said Peroo. "Mother Gunga talks good talk. I told that to the
+padre-sahib who preached on the Mombassa, and he asked the Burra Malum
+to put me in irons for a great rudeness."
+
+"Surely they make these things to please their Gods," said the Bull
+again.
+
+"Not altogether," the Elephant rolled forth. "It is for the profit of
+my mahajuns--my fat money-lenders that worship me at each new year, when
+they draw my image at the head of the account-books. I, looking over
+their shoulders by lamplight, see that the names in the books are
+those of men in far places--for all the towns are drawn together by
+the fire-carriage, and the money comes and goes swiftly, and the
+account-books grow as fat as--myself. And I, who am Ganesh of Good Luck,
+I bless my peoples."
+
+"They have changed the face of the land-which is my land. They have
+killed and made new towns on my banks," said the Mugger.
+
+"It is but the shifting of a little dirt. Let the dirt dig in the dirt
+if it pleases the dirt," answered the Elephant.
+
+"But afterwards?" said the Tiger. "Afterwards they will see that Mother
+Gunga can avenge no insult, and they fall away from her first, and later
+from us all, one by one. In the end, Ganesh, we are left with naked
+altars."
+
+The drunken Man staggered to his feet, and hiccupped vehemently.
+
+"Kali lies. My sister lies. Also this my stick is the Kotwal of Kashi,
+and he keeps tally of my pilgrims. When the time comes to worship
+Bhairon-and it is always time--the fire-carriages move one by one, and
+each bears a thousand pilgrims. They do not come afoot any more, but
+rolling upon wheels, and my honour is increased."
+
+"Gunga, I have seen thy bed at Pryag black with the pilgrims," said the
+Ape, leaning forward, "and but for the fire-carriage they would have
+come slowly and in fewer numbers. Remember."
+
+"They come to me always," Bhairon went on thickly. "By day and night
+they pray to me, all the Common People in the fields and the roads.
+Who is like Bhairon to-day? What talk is this of changing faiths? Is my
+staff Kotwal of Kashi for nothing? He keeps the tally, and he says that
+never were so many altars as today, and the fire-carriage serves them
+well. Bhairon am I--Bhairon of the Common People, and the chiefest of
+the Heavenly Ones to-day. Also my staff says--"
+
+"Peace, thou," lowed the Bull. "The worship of the schools is mine,
+and they talk very wisely, asking whether I be one or many, as is the
+delight of my people, and ye know what I am. Kali, my wife, thou knowest
+also."
+
+"Yea, I know," said the Tigress, with lowered head.
+
+"Greater am I than Gunga also. For ye know who moved the minds of men
+that they should count Gunga holy among the rivers. Who die in that
+water--ye know how men say--come to us without punishment, and Gunga
+knows that the fire-carriage has borne to her scores upon scores of such
+anxious ones; and Kali knows that she has held her chiefest festivals
+among the pilgrimages that are fed by the fire-carriage. Who smote at
+Pooree, under the Image there, her thousands in a day and a night, and
+bound the sickness to the wheels of the fire-carriages, so that it
+ran from one end of the land to the other? Who but Kali? Before the
+fire-carriage came it was a heavy toil. The fire-carriages have served
+thee well, Mother of Death. But I speak for mine own altars, who am not
+Bhairon of the Common Folk, but Shiv. Men go to and fro, making words
+and telling talk of strange Gods, and I listen. Faith follows faith
+among my people in the schools, and I have no anger; for when all words
+are said, and the new talk is ended, to Shiv men return at the last."
+
+"True. It is true," murmured Hanuman. "To Shiv and to the others,
+mother, they return. I creep from temple to temple in the North, where
+they worship one God and His Prophet; and presently my image is alone
+within their shrines."
+
+"Small thanks," said the Buck, turning his head slowly. "I am that One
+and His Prophet also."
+
+"Even so, father," said Hanuman. "And to the South I go who am the
+oldest of the Gods as men know the Gods, and presently I touch
+the shrines of the New Faith and the Woman whom we know is hewn
+twelve-armed, and still they call her Mary."
+
+"Small thanks, brother," said the Tigress. "I am that Woman."
+
+"Even so, sister; and I go West among the fire-carriages, and stand
+before the bridge-builders in many shapes, and because of me they change
+their faiths and are very wise. Ho! ho! I am the builder of bridges,
+indeed--bridges between this and that, and each bridge leads surely
+to Us in the end. Be content, Gunga. Neither these men nor those that
+follow them mock thee at all."
+
+"Am I alone, then, Heavenly Ones? Shall I smooth out my flood lest
+unhappily I bear away their walls? Will Indra dry my springs in the
+hills and make me crawl humbly between their wharfs? Shall I bury me in
+the sand ere I offend?"
+
+"And all for the sake of a little iron bar with the fire-carriage atop.
+Truly, Mother Gunga is always young!" said Ganesh the Elephant. "A
+child had not spoken more foolishly. Let the dirt dig in the dirt ere it
+return to the dirt. I know only that my people grow rich and praise
+me. Shiv has said that the men of the schools do not forget; Bhairon is
+content for his crowd of the Common People; and Hanuman laughs."
+
+"Surely I laugh," said the Ape. "My altars are few beside those of
+Ganesh or Bhairon, but the fire-carriages bring me new worshippers from
+beyond the Black Water--the men who believe that their God is toil. I
+run before them beckoning, and they follow Hanuman."
+
+"Give them the toil that they desire, then," said the River. "Make a bar
+across my flood and throw the water back upon the bridge. Once thou wast
+strong in Lanka, Hanuman. Stoop and lift my bed."
+
+"Who gives life can take life." The Ape scratched in the mud with a long
+forefinger. "And yet, who would profit by the killing? Very many would
+die."
+
+There came up from the water a snatch of a love-song such as the boys
+sing when they watch their cattle in the noon heats of late spring. The
+Parrot screamed joyously, sidling along his branch with lowered head as
+the song grew louder, and in a patch of clear moonlight stood revealed
+the young herd, the darling of the Gopis, the idol of dreaming maids
+and of mothers ere their children are born Krishna the Well-beloved. He
+stooped to knot up his long wet hair, and the Parrot fluttered to his
+shoulder.
+
+"Fleeting and singing, and singing and fleeting," hiccupped Bhairon.
+"Those make thee late for the council, brother."
+
+"And then?" said Krishna, with a laugh, throwing back his head. "Ye can
+do little without me or Karma here." He fondled the Parrot's plumage
+and laughed again. "What is this sitting and talking together? I heard
+Mother Gunga roaring in the dark, and so came quickly from a hut where I
+lay warm. And what have ye done to Karma, that he is so wet and silent?
+And what does Mother Gunga here? Are the heavens full that ye must come
+paddling in the mud beast-wise? Karma, what do they do?"
+
+"Gunga has prayed for a vengeance on the bridge-builders, and Kali is
+with her. Now she bids Hanuman whelm the bridge, that her honour may be
+made great," cried the Parrot. "I waited here, knowing that thou wouldst
+come, O my master!
+
+"And the Heavenly Ones said nothing? Did Gunga and the Mother of Sorrows
+out-talk them? Did none speak for my people?"
+
+"Nay," said Ganesh, moving uneasily from foot to foot; "I said it was
+but dirt at play, and why should we stamp it flat?"
+
+"I was content to let them toil--well content," said Hanuman.
+
+"What had I to do with Gunga's anger?" said the Bull.
+
+"I am Bhairon of the Common Folk, and this my staff is Kotwal of all
+Kashi. I spoke for the Common People."
+
+"Thou?" The young God's eyes sparkled.
+
+"Am I not the first of the Gods in their mouths to-day?" returned
+Bhairon, unabashed. "For the sake of the Common People I said--very many
+wise things which I have now forgotten, but this my staff-"
+
+Krishna turned impatiently, saw the Mugger at his feet, and kneeling,
+slipped an arm round the cold neck. "Mother," he said gently, "get thee
+to thy flood again. The matter is not for thee. What harm shall thy
+honour take of this live dirt? Thou hast given them their fields new
+year after year, and by thy flood they are made strong. They come all to
+thee at the last. What need to slay them now? Have pity, mother, for a
+little--and it is only for a little."
+
+"If it be only for a little," the slow beast began.
+
+
+
+"Are they Gods, then?" Krishna returned with a laugh, his eyes looking
+into the dull eyes of the River. "Be certain that it is only for a
+little. The Heavenly Ones have heard thee, and presently justice will
+be done. Go now, mother, to the flood again. Men and cattle are thick on
+the waters--the banks fall--the villages melt because of thee."
+
+"But the bridge--the bridge stands." The Mugger turned grunting into the
+undergrowth as Krishna rose.
+
+"It is ended," said the Tigress, viciously. "There is no more justice
+from the Heavenly Ones. Ye have made shame and sport of Gunga, who asked
+no more than a few score lives."
+
+"Of my people--who lie under the leaf-roofs of the village yonder--of
+the young girls, and the young men who sing to them in the dark--of the
+child that will be born next morn--of that which was begotten to-night,"
+said Krishna. "And when all is done, what profit? To-morrow sees them
+at work. Ay, if ye swept the bridge out from end to end they would begin
+anew. Hear me! Bhairon is drunk always. Hanuman mocks his people with
+new riddles."
+
+"Nay, but they are very old ones," the Ape said, laughing.
+
+"Shiv hears the talk of the schools and the dreams of the holy men;
+Ganesh thinks only of his fat traders; but I--I live with these my
+people, asking for no gifts, and so receiving them hourly."
+
+"And very tender art thou of thy people," said the Tigress.
+
+"They are my own. The old women dream of me turning in their sleep; the
+maids look and listen for me when they go to fill their lotahs by the
+river. I walk by the young men waiting without the gates at dusk, and I
+call over my shoulder to the white-beards. Ye know, Heavenly Ones, that
+I alone of us all walk upon the earth continually, and have no pleasure
+in our heavens so long as a green blade springs here, or there are two
+voices at twilight in the standing crops. Wise are ye, but ye live
+far off; forgetting whence ye came. So do I not forget. And the
+fire-carriage feeds your shrines, ye say? And the fire-carriages bring
+a thousand pilgrims where but ten came in the old years? True. That is
+true, to-day."
+
+"But to-morrow they are dead, brother," said Ganesh.
+
+"Peace!" said the Bull, as Hanuman leaned forward again. "And to-morrow,
+beloved--what of to-morrow?"
+
+"This only. A new word creeping from mouth to mouth among the Common
+Folk--a word that neither man nor God can lay hold of--an evil word--a
+little lazy word among the Common Folk, saying (and none know who set
+that word afoot) that they weary of ye, Heavenly Ones."
+
+The Gods laughed together softly. "And then, beloved," they said.
+
+"And to cover that weariness they, my people, will bring to thee, Shiv,
+and to thee, Ganesh, at first greater offerings and a louder noise of
+worship. But the word has gone abroad, and, after, they will pay fewer
+dues to your fat Brahmins. Next they will forget your altars, but so
+slowly that no man can say how his forgetfulness began."
+
+"I knew--I knew! I spoke this also, but they would not hear," said the
+Tigress. "We should have slain-we should have slain!"
+
+"It is too late now. Ye should have slain at the beginning when the men
+from across the water had taught our folk nothing. Now my people see
+their work, and go away thinking. They do not think of the Heavenly Ones
+altogether. They think of the fire-carriage and the other things that
+the bridge-builders have done, and when your priests thrust forward
+hands asking alms, they give a little unwillingly. That is the
+beginning, among one or two, or five or ten--for I, moving among my
+people, know what is in their hearts."
+
+"And the end, Jester of the Gods? What shall the end be?" said Ganesh.
+
+"The end shall be as it was in the beginning, O slothful son of Shiv!
+The flame shall die upon the altars and the prayer upon the tongue till
+ye become little Gods again--Gods of the jungle--names that the hunters
+of rats and noosers of dogs whisper in the thicket and among the
+caves--rag-Gods, pot Godlings of the tree, and the village-mark, as
+ye were at the beginning. That is the end, Ganesh, for thee, and for
+Bhairon--Bhairon of the Common People."
+
+"It is very far away," grunted Bhairon. "Also, it is a lie."
+
+"Many women have kissed Krishna. They told him this to cheer their own
+hearts when the grey hairs came, and he has told us the tale," said the
+Bull, below his breath.
+
+"Their Gods came, and we changed them. I took the Woman and made her
+twelve-armed. So shall we twist all their Gods," said Hanuman.
+
+"Their Gods! This is no question of their Gods--one or three--man or
+woman. The matter is with the people. I move, and not the Gods of the
+bridge-builders," said Krishna.
+
+"So be it. I have made a man worship the fire-carriage as it stood still
+breathing smoke, and he knew not that he worshipped me," said Hanuman
+the Ape. "They will only change a little the names of their Gods.
+I shall lead the builders of the bridges as of old; Shiv shall be
+worshipped in the schools by such as doubt and despise their fellows;
+Ganesh shall have his mahajuns, and Bhairon the donkey-drivers, the
+pilgrims, and the sellers of toys. Beloved, they will do no more than
+change the names, and that we have seen a thousand times."
+
+"Surely they will do no more than change the names," echoed Ganesh; but
+there was an uneasy movement among the Gods.
+
+"They will change more than the names. Me alone they cannot kill, so
+long as a maiden and a man meet together or the spring follows the
+winter rains. Heavenly Ones, not for nothing have I walked upon the
+earth. My people know not now what they know; but I, who live with
+them, I read their hearts. Great Kings, the beginning of the end is born
+already. The fire-carriages shout the names of new Gods that are not the
+old under new names. Drink now and eat greatly! Bathe your faces in the
+smoke of the altars before they grow cold! Take dues and listen to the
+cymbals and the drums, Heavenly Ones, while yet there are flowers and
+songs. As men count time the end is far off; but as we who know reckon
+it is to-day. I have spoken."
+
+The young God ceased, and his brethren looked at each other long in
+silence.
+
+"This I have not heard before," Peroo whispered in his companion's ear.
+"And yet sometimes, when I oiled the brasses in the engine-room of the
+Goorkha, I have wondered if our priests were so wise--so wise. The day
+is coming, Sahib. They will be gone by the morning."
+
+A yellow light broadened in the sky, and the tone of the river changed
+as the darkness withdrew.
+
+Suddenly the Elephant trumpeted aloud as though man had goaded him.
+
+"Let Indra judge. Father of all, speak thou! What of the things we have
+heard? Has Krishna lied indeed? Or---"
+
+"Ye know," said the Buck, rising to his feet. "Ye know the Riddle of the
+Gods. When Brahm ceases to dream, the Heavens and the Hells and Earth
+disappear. Be content. Brahm dreams still. The dreams come and go, and
+the nature of the dreams changes, but still Brahm dreams. Krishna has
+walked too long upon earth, and yet I love him the more for the tale he
+has told. The Gods change, beloved--all save One!"
+
+"Ay, all save one that makes love in the hearts of men," said Krishna,
+knotting his girdle. "It is but a little time to wait, and ye shall know
+if I lie. Truly it is but a little time, as thou sayest, and we shall
+know. Get thee to thy huts again, beloved, and make sport for the young
+things, for still Brahm dreams. Go, my children! Brahm dreams and till
+he wakes the Gods die not."
+
+"Whither went they?" said the Lascar, awe-struck, shivering a little
+with the cold.
+
+"God knows!" said Findlayson. The river and the island lay in full
+daylight now, and there was never mark of hoof or pug on the wet earth
+under the peepul. Only a parrot screamed in the branches, bringing down
+showers of water-drops as he fluttered his wings.
+
+"Up! We are cramped with cold! Has the opium died out. Canst thou move,
+Sahib?"
+
+Findlayson staggered to his feet and shook himself. His bead swam
+and ached, but the work of the opium was over, and, as he sluiced his
+forehead in a pool, the Chief Engineer of the Kashi Bridge was wondering
+how he had managed to fall upon the island, what chances the day offered
+of return, and, above all, how his work stood.
+
+"Peroo, I have forgotten much I was under the guard-tower watching the
+river; and then--Did the flood sweep us away?"
+
+"No. The boats broke loose, Sahib, and," (if the Sahib had forgotten
+about the opium, decidedly Peroo would not remind him) "in striving to
+retie them, so it seemed to me but it was dark--a rope caught the Sahib
+and threw him upon a boat. Considering that we two, with Hitchcock
+Sahib, built, as it were, that bridge, I came also upon the boat, which
+came riding on horseback, as it were, on the nose of this island, and
+so, splitting, cast us ashore. I made a great cry when the boat left
+the wharf and without doubt Hitchcock Sahib will come for us. As for the
+bridge, so many have died in the building that it cannot fall." A fierce
+sun, that drew out all the smell of the sodden land, had followed the
+storm, and in that clear light there was no room for a man to think of
+the dreams of the dark. Findlayson stared upstream, across the blaze of
+moving water, till his eyes ached. There was no sign of any bank to the
+Ganges, much less of a bridge-line.
+
+"We came down far," he said. "It was wonderful that we were not drowned
+a hundred times."
+
+"That was the least of the wonder, for no man dies before his time.
+I have seen Sydney, I have seen London, and twenty great ports,
+but,"--Peroo looked at the damp, discoloured shrine under the
+peepul--"never man has seen that we saw here."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Has the Sahib forgotten; or do we black men only see the Gods?"
+
+"There was a fever upon me." Findlayson was still looking uneasily
+across the water. "It seemed that the island was full of beasts and men
+talking, but I do not remember. A boat could live in this water now, I
+think."
+
+"Oho! Then it is true. 'When Brahm ceases to dream, the Gods die.' Now I
+know, indeed, what he meant. Once, too, the guru said as much to me; but
+then I did not understand. Now I am wise."
+
+"What?" said Findlayson, over his shoulder.
+
+Peroo went on as if he were talking to himself "Six--seven--ten monsoons
+since, I was watch on the fo'c'sle of the Rewah--the Kumpani's big
+boat--and there was a big tufan; green and black water beating, and I
+held fast to the life-lines, choking under the waters. Then I thought
+of the Gods--of Those whom we saw to-night,"--he stared curiously at
+Findlayson's back, but the white man was looking across the flood. "Yes,
+I say of Those whom we saw this night past, and I called upon Them to
+protect me. And while I prayed, still keeping my lookout, a big wave
+came and threw me forward upon the ring of the great black bow-anchor,
+and the Rewah rose high and high, leaning towards the left-hand side,
+and the water drew away from beneath her nose, and I lay upon my belly,
+holding the ring, and looking down into those great deeps. Then I
+thought, even in the face of death: If I lose hold I die, and for me
+neither the Rewah nor my place by the galley where the rice is cooked,
+nor Bombay, nor Calcutta, nor even London, will be any more for me. 'How
+shall I be sure,' I said, 'that the Gods to whom I pray will abide at
+all?' This I thought, and the Rewah dropped her nose as a hammer falls,
+and all the sea came in and slid me backwards along the fo'c'sle and
+over the break of the fo'c'sle, and I very badly bruised my shin against
+the donkey-engine: but I did not die, and I have seen the Gods. They are
+good for live men, but for the dead. . . . They have spoken Themselves.
+Therefore, when I come to the village I will beat the guru for talking
+riddles which are no riddles. When Brahm ceases to dream the Gods go."
+
+"Look up-stream. The light blinds. Is there smoke yonder?"
+
+Peroo shaded his eyes with his hands. "He is a wise man and quick.
+Hitchcock Sahib would not trust a rowboat. He has borrowed the Rao
+Sahib's steam-launch, and comes to look for us. I have always said that
+there should have been a steam-launch on the bridge works for us."
+
+The territory of the Rao of Baraon lay within ten miles of the bridge;
+and Findlayson and Hitchcock had spent a fair portion of their scanty
+leisure in playing billiards and shooting blackbuck with the young man.
+He had been bearded by an English tutor of sporting tastes for some
+five or six years, and was now royally wasting the revenues accumulated
+during his minority by the Indian Government. His steam-launch, with its
+silver-plated rails, striped silk awning, and mahogany decks, was a new
+toy which Findlayson had found horribly in the way when the Rao came to
+look at the bridge works.
+
+"It's great luck," murmured Findlayson, but he was none the less afraid,
+wondering what news might be of the bridge.
+
+The gaudy blue-and-white funnel came downstream swiftly. They could see
+Hitchcock in the bows, with a pair of opera-glasses, and his face was
+unusually white. Then Peroo hailed, and the launch made for the tail
+of the island. The Rao Sahib, in tweed shooting-suit and a seven-hued
+turban, waved his royal hand, and Hitchcock shouted. But he need have
+asked no questions, for Findlayson's first demand was for his bridge.
+
+"All serene! 'Gad, I never expected to see you again, Findlayson. You're
+seven koss downstream. Yes; there's not a stone shifted anywhere; but
+how are you? I borrowed the Rao Sahib's launch, and he was good enough
+to come along. Jump in. Ah, Finlinson, you are very well, eh? That was
+most unprecedented calamity last night, eh? My royal palace, too, it
+leaks like the devil, and the crops will also be short all about my
+country. Now you shall back her out, Hitchcock. I--I do not understand
+steam-engines. You are wet? You are cold, Finlinson? I have some things
+to eat here, and you will take a good drink."
+
+"I'm immensely grateful, Rao Sahib. I believe you've saved my life. How
+did Hitchcock--"
+
+"Oho! His hair was upon end. He rode to me in the middle of the night
+and woke me up in the arms of Morpheus. I was most truly concerned,
+Finlinson, so I came too. My head-priest he is very angry just now. We
+will go quick, Mister Hitchcock. I am due to attend at twelve forty-five
+in the state temple, where we sanctify some new idol. If not so I
+would have asked you to spend the day with me. They are dam-bore, these
+religious ceremonies, Finlinson, eh?"
+
+Peroo, well known to the crew, had possessed himself of the inlaid
+wheel, and was taking the launch craftily up-stream. But while he
+steered he was, in his mind, handling two feet of partially untwisted
+wire-rope; and the back upon which he beat was the back of his guru.
+
+
+
+
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+Project Gutenberg Etext The Bridge-Builders, by Rudyard Kipling
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+
+
+
+
+
+This Project Gutenberg Etext prepared by Bill Stoddard
+hscrr@vgernet.net
+
+
+
+
+
+The Bridge-Builders
+
+by Ridyard 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
+offce-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.
+
+A shrill wail ran along the line, growing to a yell, half fear
+and half wonder: the face of the river whitened from bank to hank
+between the stone facings, and the far-away spurs went out in
+spouts of foam.  Mother Gunga had come bank-high in haste, and a
+wall of chocolate-coloured water was her messenger.  There was a
+shriek above the roar of the water, the complaint of the spans
+coming down on their blocks as the cribs were whirled out from
+under their bellies.  The stone-boats groaned and ground each
+other in the eddy that swung round the abutment, and their clumsy
+masts rose higher and higher against the dim sky-line.
+
+"Before she was shut between these walls we knew what she would
+do.  Now she is thus cramped God only knows what she will do!"
+said Peroo, watching the furious turmoil round the guard-tower.
+"Ohe'! Fight, then! Fight hard, for it is thus that a woman wears
+herself out."
+
+But Mother Gunga would not fight as Peroo desired.  After the
+first down-stream plunge there came no more walls of water, but
+the river lifted herself bodily, as a snake when she drinks in
+midsummer, plucking and fingering along the revetments, and
+banking up behind the piers till even Findlayson began to
+recalculate the strength of his work.
+
+When day came the village gasped.  "Only last night," men said,
+turning to each other, "it was as a town in the river-bed!  Look now!"
+
+And they looked and wondered afresh at the deep water, the
+racing water that licked the throat of the piers.  The farther
+bank was veiled by rain, into which the bridge ran out and
+vanished; the spurs up-stream were marked by no more than eddies
+and spoutings, and down-stream the pent river, once freed of her
+guide-lines, had spread like a sea to the horizon.  Then hurried
+by, rolling in the water, dead men and oxen together, with here
+and there a patch of thatched roof that melted when it touched a
+pier.
+
+"Big flood," said Peroo, and Findlayson nodded.  It was as big a
+flood as he had any wish to watch.  His bridge would stand
+what was upon her now, but not very much more, and if by any of a
+thousand chances there happened to be a weakness in the
+embankments, Mother Gunga would carry his honour to the sea with
+the other raffle.  Worst of all, there was nothing to do except
+to sit still; and Findlayson sat still under his macintosh till
+his helmet became pulp on his head, and his boots were over-ankle
+in mire.  He took no count of time, for the river was marking the
+hours, inch by inch and foot by foot, along the embankment, and
+he listened, numb and hungry, to the straining of the
+stone-boats, the hollow thunder under the piers, and the hundred
+noises that make the full note of a flood.  Once a dripping
+servant brought him food, but he could not eat; and once he
+thought that he heard a faint toot from a locomotive across the
+river, and then he smiled.  The bridge's failure would hurt his
+assistant not a little, hut Hitchcock was a young man with his
+big work yet to do.  For himself the crash meant everything -
+everything that made a hard life worth the living.  They would
+say, the men of his own profession . . .he remembered the
+half-pitying things that he himself had said when Lockhart's new
+waterworks burst and broke down in brick-heaps and sludge, and
+Lockhart's spirit broke in him and he died.  He remembered what
+he himself had said when the Sumao Bridge went out in the big
+cyclone by the sea; and most he remembered poor Hartopp's face
+three weeks later, when the shame had marked it.  His bridge was
+twice the size of Hartopp's, and it carried the Findlayson truss
+as well as the new pier-shoe - the Findlayson bolted shoe.  There
+were no excuses in his service.  Government might listen,
+perhaps, but his own kind would judge him by his bridge, as that
+stood or fell.  He went over it in his head, plate by plate, span
+by span, brick by brick, pier by pier, remembering, comparing,
+estimating, and recalculating, lest there should be any mistake;
+and through the long hours and through the flights of formulae
+that danced and wheeled before him a cold fear would come to
+pinch his heart.  His side of the sum was beyond question; but
+what man knew Mother Gunga's arithmetic?  Even as he was making
+all sure by the multiplication table, the river might be scooping
+a pot-hole to the very bottom of any one of those eighty-foot
+piers that carried his reputation.  Again a servant came to him
+with food, but his mouth was dry, and he could only drink and
+return to the decimals in his brain.  And the river was still
+rising.  Peroo, in a mat shelter coat, crouched at his feet,
+watching now his face and now the face of the river, but saying
+nothing.
+
+At last the Lascar rose and floundered through the mud towards
+the village, but he was careful to leave an ally to watch the
+boats.
+
+Presently he returned, most irreverently driving before him the
+priest of his creed - a fat old man, with a grey beard that
+whipped the wind with the wet cloth that blew over his shoulder.
+Never was seen so lamentable a guru.
+
+"What good are offerings and little kerosene lamps and dry
+grain," shouted Peroo, "if squatting in the mud is all that thou
+canst do?  Thou hast dealt long with the Gods when they were
+contented and well-wishing.  Now they are angry.  Speak to them!"
+
+"What is a man against the wrath of Gods?" whined the priest,
+cowering as the wind took him.  "Let me go to the temple, and I
+will pray there."
+
+"Son of a pig, pray here!  Is there no return for salt fish and
+curry powder and dried onions?  Call aloud!  Tell Mother Gunga we
+have had enough.  Bid her be still for the night.  I cannot pray,
+but I have been serving in the Kumpani's boats, and when men did
+not obey my orders I -"  A flourish of the wire-rope colt rounded
+the sentence, and the priest, breaking free from his disciple,
+fled to the village.
+
+"Fat pig!" said Peroo.  "After all that we have done for him!
+When the flood is down I will see to it that we get a new guru.
+Finlinson Sahib, it darkens for night now, and since yesterday
+nothing has been eaten.  Be wise, Sahib.  No man can endure
+watching and great thinking on an empty belly.  Lie down, Sahib.
+The river will do what the river will do." "The bridge is mine; I
+cannot leave it."
+
+"Wilt thou hold it up with thy hands, then?" said Peroo,
+laughing.  "I was troubled for my boats and sheers before the
+flood came.  Now we are in the hands of the Gods.  The Sahib will
+not eat and lie down?  Take these, then.  They are meat and good
+toddy together, and they kill all weariness, besides the fever
+that follows the rain.  I have eaten nothing else to-day at all."
+
+He took a small tin tobacco-box from his sodden waist-belt and
+thrust it into Findlayson's hand, saying: "Nay, do not be afraid. 
+It is no more than opium - clean Malwa opium."
+
+Findlayson shook two or three of the dark-brown pellets into his
+hand, and hardly knowing what he did, swallowed them.  The stuff
+was at least a good guard against fever -the fever that was
+creeping upon him out of the wet mud -and he had seen what Peroo
+could do in the stewing mists of autumn on the strength of a dose
+from the tin box.
+
+Peroo nodded with bright eyes.  "In a little - in a little the
+Sahib will find that he thinks well again.  I too will -"
+He dived into his treasure-box, resettled the rain-coat over
+his head, and squatted down to watch the boats.  It was too dark
+now to see beyond the first pier, and the night seemed to have
+given the river new strength.  Findlayson stood with his chin on
+his chest, thinking.  There was one point about one of the piers
+- the seventh - that he had not fully settled in his mind.  The
+figures would not shape themselves to the eye except one by one
+and at enormous intervals of time.  There was a sound rich and
+mellow in his ears like the deepest note of a double-bass - an
+entrancing sound upon which he pondered for several hours, as it
+seemed. Then Peroo was at his elbow, shouting that a wire hawser
+had snapped and the stone-boats were loose.  Findlayson saw the
+fleet open and swing out fanwise to a long-drawn shriek of wire
+straining across gunnels.
+
+"A tree hit them.  They will all go," cried Peroo.  "The main
+hawser has parted.  What does the Sahib do?"
+
+An immensely complex plan had suddenly flashed into Findlayson's
+mind.  He saw the ropes running from boat to boat in straight
+lines and angles - each rope a line of white fire.  But there was
+one rope which was the master rope.  He could see that rope.  If
+he could pull it once, it was absolutely and mathematically
+certain that the disordered fleet would reassemble itself in the
+backwater behind the guard-tower.  But why, he wondered, was
+Peroo clinging so desperately to his waist as he hastened down
+the bank?  It was necessary to put the Lascar aside, gently and
+slowly, because it was necessary to save the boats, and, further,
+to demonstrate the extreme ease of the problem that looked so
+difficult.  And then - but it was of no conceivable importance -
+a wire-rope raced through his hand, burning it, the high bank
+disappeared,  and with it all the slowly dispersing factors of
+the problem.  He was sitting in the rainy darkness - sitting in a
+boat that spun like a top, and Peroo was standing over him.
+
+"I had forgotten," said the Lascar, slowly, "that to those
+fasting and unused, the opium is worse than any wine.  Those who
+die in Gunga go to the Gods.  Still, I have no desire to present
+myself before such great ones.  Can the Sahib swim?"
+
+"What need?  He can fly - fly as swiftly as the wind," was the
+thick answer.
+
+"He is mad!" muttered Peroo, under his breath.  "And he threw me
+aside like a bundle of dung-cakes.  Well, he will not know his
+death.  The boat cannot live an hour here even if she strike
+nothing.  It is not good to look at death  with a clear eye."
+
+He refreshed himself again from the tin box, squatted down in the
+bows of the reeling, pegged, and stitched craft, staring through
+the mist at the nothing that was there.  A warm drowsiness crept
+over Findlayson, the Chief Engineer, whose duty was with his
+bridge.  The heavy raindrops struck him with a thousand tingling
+little thrills, and the weight of all time since time was made
+hung heavy on his eyelids.  He thought and perceived that he was
+perfectly secure, for the water was so solid that a man could
+surely step out upon it, and, standing still with his legs apart
+to keep his balance - this was the most important point - would
+be borne with great and easy speed to the shore.  But yet a
+better plan came to him.  It needed only an exertion of will for
+the soul to hurl the body ashore as wind drives paper, to waft it
+kite-fashion to the bank.  Thereafter - the boat spun dizzily -
+suppose the high wind got under the freed body?  Would it tower
+up like a kite and pitch headlong on the far-away sands, or would
+it duck about, beyond control, through all eternity?  Findlayson
+gripped the gunnel to anchor himself, for it seemed that he was
+on the edge of taking the flight before he had settled all his
+plans.  Opium has more effect on the white man than the black.
+Peroo was only comfortably indifferent to accidents.  "She cannot
+live," he grunted.  "Her seams open already.  If she were even a
+dinghy with oars we could have ridden it out; but a box with
+holes is no good.  Finlinson Sahib, she fills."
+
+"Accha!  I am going away.  Come thou also." In his mind,
+Findlayson had already escaped from the boat, and was circling
+high in air to find a rest for the sole of his foot.  His body -
+he was really sorry for its gross helplessness - lay in the
+stern, the water rushing about its knees.
+
+"How very ridiculous!" he said to himself from his eyrie -" that
+- is Findlayson -  chief of the Kashi Bridge.  The poor beast is
+going to be drowned, too.  Drowned when it's close to shore.  I'm
+- I'm on shore already.  Why doesn't  it come along?"
+
+To his intense disgust, he found his soul back in his body again,
+and that body spluttering and choking in deep water.  The pain of
+the reunion was atrocious, but it was necessary, also, to fight
+for the body.  He was conscious of grasping wildly at wet sand,
+and striding prodigiously, as one strides in a dream, to keep
+foothold in the swirling water, till at last he hauled himself
+clear of the hold of the river, and dropped, panting, on wet
+earth.
+
+"Not this night," said Peroo, in his ear.  "The Gods have
+protected us."  The Lascar moved his feet cautiously, and they
+rustled among dried stumps.  "This is some island of last year's
+indigo-crop," he went on.  "We shall find no men here; but have
+great care, Sahib; all the snakes of a hundred miles have been
+flooded out.  Here comes the lightning, on the heels of the
+wind. Now we shall be able to look; but walk carefully."
+
+Findlayson was far and far beyond any fear of snakes, or indeed
+any merely human emotion.  He saw, after he had rubbed the water
+from his eyes, with an immense clearness, and trod, so it seemed
+to himself with world-encompassing strides.  Somewhere in the
+night of time he had built a bridge - a bridge that spanned
+illimitable levels of shining seas; but the Deluge had swept it
+away, leaving this one island under heaven for Findlayson and his
+companion, sole survivors of the breed of Man.
+
+An incessant lightning, forked and blue, showed all that there was
+to be seen on the little patch in the flood - a clump of thorn,
+a clump of swaying creaking bamboos, and a grey gnarled peepul
+overshadowing a Hindoo shrine, from whose dome floated a
+tattered red flag.  The holy man whose summer resting-place it
+was had long since abandoned it, and the weather had broken the
+red-daubed image of his god.  The two men stumbled, heavy-limbed
+and heavy-eyed, over the ashes of a brick-set cooking-place, and
+dropped down under the shelter of the branches, while the rain
+and river roared together.
+
+The stumps of the indigo crackled, and there was a smell of
+cattle, as a huge and dripping Brahminee bull shouldered his way
+under the tree.  The flashes revealed the trident mark of
+Shiva on his flank, the insolence of head and hump, the luminous
+stag-like eyes, the brow crowned with a wreath of sodden marigold
+blooms, and the silky dewlap that almost swept the ground.  There
+was a noise behind him of other beasts coming up from the
+flood-line through the thicket, a sound of heavy feet and deep
+breathing.
+
+"Here be more beside ourselves," said Findlayson, his head against
+the treepole, looking through half-shut eyes, wholly at ease.
+
+"Truly," said Peroo, thickly, "and no small ones."
+
+"What are they, then?  I do not see clearly."
+
+"The Gods.  Who else?  Look!"
+
+"Ah, true!  The Gods surely - the Gods." Findlayson smiled as his
+head fell forward on his chest.  Peroo was eminently right. After
+the Flood, who should be alive in the land except the Gods that
+made it - the Gods to whom his village prayed nightly - the Gods
+who were in all men's mouths and about all men's ways.  He could
+not raise his head or stir a finger for the trance that held him,
+and Peroo was smiling vacantly at the lightning.
+
+The Bull paused by the shrine, his head lowered to the damp
+earth.  A green Parrot in the branches preened his wet wings and
+screamed against the thunder as the circle under the tree filled
+with the shifting shadows of beasts.  There was a black Buck
+at the Bull's heels-such a Buck as Findlayson in his far-away
+life upon earth might have seen in dreams - a Buck with a royal
+head, ebon back, silver belly, and gleaming straight horns. 
+Beside him, her head bowed to the ground, the green eyes burning
+under the heavy brows, with restless tail switching the dead
+grass, paced a Tigress, full-bellied and deep-jowled.
+
+The Bull crouched beside the shrine, and there leaped from the
+darkness a monstrous grey Ape, who seated himself man-wise in the
+place of the fallen image, and the rain spilled like jewels from
+the hair of his neck and shoulders.  Other shadows came and went
+behind the circle, among them a drunken Man flourishing staff and
+drinking-bottle.  Then a hoarse bellow broke out from near the
+ground.  "The flood lessens even now," it cried.  "Hour by hour
+the water falls, and their bridge still stands!"
+
+"My bridge," said Findlayson to himself "That must be very old
+work now.  What have the Gods to do with my bridge?"
+
+His eyes rolled in the darkness following the roar.  A Mugger -
+the blunt-nosed, ford-haunting Mugger of the Ganges -draggled
+herself before the beasts, lashing furiously to right and left
+with her tail.
+
+"They have made it too strong for me.  In all this night I have
+only torn away a handful of planks.  The walls stand.  The towers
+stand.  They have chained my flood, and the river is not free any
+more.  Heavenly Ones, take this yoke away!  Give me clear water
+between bank and bank!  It is I, Mother Gunga, that speak.  The
+Justice of the Gods!  Deal me the Justice of the Gods!"
+
+"What said I?" whispered Peroo.  "This is in truth a Punchayet of
+the Gods.  Now we know that all the world is dead, save you and
+I, Sahib."
+
+The Parrot screamed and fluttered again, and the Tigress, her
+ears flat to her head, snarled wickedly.
+
+Somewhere in the shadow, a great trunk and gleaming tusks swayed
+to and fro, and a low gurgle broke the silence that followed on
+the snarl.
+
+"We be here," said a deep voice, "the Great Ones.  One only and
+very many.  Shiv, my father, is here, with Indra.  Kali has
+spoken already.  Hanuman listens also."
+
+"Kashi is without her Kotwal to-night," shouted the Man with the
+drinking-bottle, flinging his staff to the ground, while the
+island rang to the baying of hounds.  "Give her the Justice of
+the Gods."
+
+"Ye were still when they polluted my waters," the great Crocodile
+bellowed.  "Ye made no sign when my river was trapped between the
+walls.  I had no help save my own strength, and that failed - the
+strength of Mother Gunga failed - before their guard-towers. What
+could I do?  I have done everything.  Finish now, Heavenly Ones!"
+
+"I brought the death; I rode the spotted sick-ness from hut to
+hut of their workmen, and yet they would not cease." A
+nose-slitten, hide-worn Ass, lame, scissor-legged, and galled,
+limped forward.  "I cast the death at them out of my nostrils,
+but they would not cease."
+
+Peroo would have moved, but the opium lay heavy upon him.
+
+"Bah!" he said, spitting.  "Here is Sitala herself; Mata - the
+small-pox.  Has the Sahib a handkerchief to put over his face?"
+
+"Little help!  They fed me the corpses for a month, and I flung
+them out on my sand-bars, but their work went forward.  Demons
+they are, and sons of demons! And ye left Mother Gunga alone for
+their fire-carriage to make a mock of The Justice of the Gods on
+the bridge-builders!"
+
+The Bull turned the cud in his mouth and answered slowly: "If the
+Justice of the Gods caught all who made a mock of holy things
+there would be many dark altars in the land, mother."
+
+"But this goes beyond a mock," said the Tigress, darting forward
+a griping paw.  "Thou knowest, Shiv, and ye, too, Heavenly Ones;
+ye know that they have defiled Gunga.  Surely they must come to
+the Destroyer.  Let Indra judge."
+
+The Buck made no movement as he answered:  "How long has this
+evil been?
+
+"Three years, as men count years," said the Mugger, close
+pressed to the earth.
+
+"Does Mother Gunga die, then, in a year, that she is so anxious
+to see vengeance now?  The deep sea was where she runs but
+yesterday, and to-morrow the sea shall cover her again as the
+Gods count that which men call time.  Can any say that this their
+bridge endures till to-morrow?" said the Buck.
+
+There was a long hush, and in the clearing of the storm the full
+moon stood up above the dripping trees.
+
+"Judge ye, then," said the River, sullenly.  "I have spoken my
+shame.  The flood falls still.  I can do no more."
+
+"For my own part " - it was the voice of the great Ape seated
+within the shrine -" it pleases me well to watch these men,
+remembering that I also builded no small bridge in the world's youth."
+
+"They say, too," snarled the Tiger, "that these men came of the
+wreck of thy armies, Hanuman, and therefore thou hast aided -"
+
+"They toil as my armies toiled in Lanka, and they believe that
+their toil endures.  Indra is too high, but Shiv, thou knowest
+how the land is threaded with their fire-carriages."
+
+"Yea, I know," said the Bull.  "Their Gods instructed them
+in the matter."
+
+A laugh ran round the circle.
+
+"Their Gods! What should their Gods know?  They were born yesterday,
+and those that made them are scarcely yet cold," said the Mugger.
+"To-morrow their Gods will die."
+
+"Ho!" said Peroo.  "Mother Gunga talks good talk.  I told that to
+the padre-sahib who preached on the Mombassa, and he asked the
+Burra Malum to put me in irons for a great rudeness."
+
+"Surely they make these things to please their Gods," said the Bull again.
+
+"Not altogether," the Elephant rolled forth.  "It is for the
+profit of my mahajuns - my fat money-lenders that worship me at
+each new year, when they draw my image at the head of the
+account-books.  I, looking over their shoulders by lamplight,
+see that the names in the books are those of men in far places -
+for all the towns are drawn together by the fire-carriage, and
+the money comes and goes swiftly, and the account-books grow as
+fat as - myself.  And I, who am Ganesh of Good Luck, I bless my
+peoples."
+
+"They have changed the face of the land-which is my land.  They
+have killed and made new towns on my banks," said the Mugger.
+
+"It is but the shifting of a little dirt.  Let the dirt dig in
+the dirt if it pleases the dirt," answered the Elephant.
+
+"But afterwards?" said the Tiger.  "Afterwards they will see that
+Mother Gunga can avenge no insult, and they fall away from her
+first, and later from us all, one by one.  In the end, Ganesh, we
+are left with naked altars."
+
+The drunken Man staggered to his feet, and hiccupped vehemently.
+
+"Kali lies.  My sister lies.  Also this my stick is the Kotwal of
+Kashi, and he keeps tally of my pilgrims.  When the time comes to
+worship Bhairon-and it is always time - the fire-carriages move
+one by one, and each bears a thousand pilgrims.  They do not come
+afoot any more, but rolling upon wheels, and my honour is
+increased."
+
+"Gunga, I have seen thy bed at Pryag black with the pilgrims,"
+said the Ape, leaning forward, "and but for the fire-carriage
+they would have come slowly and in fewer numbers.  Remember."
+
+"They come to me always," Bhairon went on thickly.  "By day and
+night they pray to me, all the Common People in the fields and
+the roads.  Who is like Bhairon to-day?  What talk is this of
+changing faiths?  Is my staff Kotwal of Kashi for nothing?
+He keeps the tally, and he says that never were so many altars
+as today, and the firecarriage serves them well.  Bhairon am I -
+Bhairon of the Common People, and the chiefest of the Heavenly
+Ones to-day.  Also my staff says -"
+
+"Peace, thou" lowed the Bull.  "The worship of the schools is
+mine, and they talk very wisely, asking whether I be one or many,
+as is the delight of my people, and ye know what I am.  Kali, my
+wife, thou knowest also."
+
+"Yea, I know," said the Tigress, with lowered head.
+
+"Greater am I than Gunga also.  For ye know who moved the minds
+of men that they should count Gunga holy among the rivers.  Who
+die in that water - ye know how  men say - come to us without
+punishment, and Gunga knows that the fire-carriage  has borne to
+her scores upon scores of such anxious ones; and Kali knows that
+she has held her chiefest festivals among the pilgrimages that
+are fed by the fire-carriage.  Who smote at Pooree, under the
+Image there, her thousands in a day and a night, and bound the
+sickness to the wheels of the fire-carriages, so that it ran from
+one end of the land to the other?  Who but Kali?  Before the
+fire-carriage came it was a heavy toil.  The fire-carriages have
+served thee well, Mother of Death.  But I speak for mine own
+altars, who am not Bhairon of the Common Folk, but Shiv.  Men go
+to and fro, making words and telling talk of strange Gods, and I
+listen.  Faith follows faith among my people in the schools,
+and I have no anger; for when all words are said, and the new
+talk is ended, to Shiv men return at the last."
+
+"True.  It is true," murmured Hanuman.  "To Shiv and to the
+others, mother, they return.  I creep from temple to temple in
+the North, where they worship one God and His Prophet; and
+presently my image is alone within their shrines."
+
+"Small thanks," said the Buck, turning his head slowly.  "I am
+that One and His Prophet also."
+
+"Even so, father," said Hanuman.  "And to the South I go who am
+the oldest of the Gods as men know the Gods, and presently I
+touch the shrines of the New Faith and the Woman whom we know is
+hewn twelve-armed, and still they call her Mary."
+
+"Small thanks, brother," said the Tigress.  "I am that Woman."
+
+"Even so, sister; and I go West among the fire-carriages, and
+stand before the bridge-builders in many shapes, and because of
+me they change their faiths and are very wise.  Ho! ho! I am the
+builder of bridges, indeed - bridges between this and that, and
+each bridge leads surely to Us in the end.  Be content, Gunga.
+Neither these men nor those that follow them mock thee at all."
+
+"Am I alone, then, Heavenly Ones?  Shall I smooth out my flood
+lest unhappily I bear away their walls?  Will Indra dry my
+springs in the hills and make me crawl humbly between their
+wharfs?  Shall I bury me in the sand ere I offend?"
+
+"And all for the sake of a little iron bar with the fire-carriage
+atop.  Truly, Mother Gunga is always young!" said Ganesh the
+Elephant.  "A child had not spoken more foolishly.  Let the dirt
+dig in the dirt ere it return to the dirt.  I know only that my
+people grow rich and praise me.  Shiv has said that the men of
+the schools do not forget; Bhairon is content for his crowd of
+the Common People; and Hanuman laughs."
+
+"Surely I laugh," said the Ape.  "My altars are few beside those
+of Ganesh or Bhairon, but the fire-carriages bring me new
+worshippers from beyond the Black Water - the men who believe
+that their God is toil.  I run before them beckoning, and they
+follow Hanuman."
+
+"Give them the toil that they desire, then," said the River.
+"Make a bar across my flood and throw the water back upon the bridge.
+Once thou wast strong in Lanka, Hanuman.  Stoop and lift my bed."
+
+"Who gives life can take life." The Ape scratched in the mud with
+a long forefinger.  "And yet, who would profit by the killing?
+Very many would die."
+
+There came up from the water a snatch of a love-song such as the
+boys sing when they watch their cattle in the noon heats of late
+spring.  The Parrot screamed joyously, sidling along his
+branch with lowered head as the song grew louder, and in a patch
+of clear moonlight stood revealed the young herd, the darling of
+the Gopis, the idol of dreaming maids and of mothers ere their
+children are born  Krishna the Well-beloved.  He stooped to knot
+up his long wet hair, and the Parrot fluttered to his shoulder.
+
+"Fleeting and singing, and singing and fleeting," hiccupped
+Bhairon.  "Those make thee late for the council, brother."
+
+"And then?" said Krishna, with a laugh, throwing back his head.
+"Ye can do little without me or Karma here." He fondled the
+Parrot's plumage and laughed again.  "What is this sitting and
+talking together?  I heard Mother Gunga roaring in the dark, and
+so came quickly from a hut where I lay warm.  And what have ye
+done to Karma, that he is so wet and silent?  And what does Mother
+Gunga here?  Are the heavens full that ye must come paddling in
+the mud beast-wise?  Karma, what do they do?"
+
+"Gunga has prayed for a vengeance on the bridge-builders, and
+Kali is with her.  Now she bids Hanuman whelm the bridge, that
+her honour may be made great," cried the Parrot.  "I waited here,
+knowing that thou wouldst come, O my master!
+
+"And the Heavenly Ones said nothing?  Did Gunga and the Mother of
+Sorrows out-talk them?  Did none speak for my people?"
+
+"Nay," said Ganesh, moving uneasily from foot to foot; "I said it
+was but dirt at play, and why should we stamp it flat?"
+
+"I was content to let them toil -well content," said Hanuman.
+
+"What had I to do with Gunga's anger?" said the Bull.
+
+"I am Bhairon of the Common Folk, and this my staff is Kotwal of
+all Kashi.  I spoke for the Common People."
+
+"Thou?" The young God's eyes sparkled.
+
+"Am I not the first of the Gods in their mouths to-day?" returned
+Bhairon, unabashed.  "For the sake of the Common People I said -
+very many wise things which I have now forgotten, but this my staff-"
+
+Krishna turned impatiently, saw the Mugger at his feet, and kneeling,
+slipped an arm round the cold neck.  "Mother," he said gently,
+"get thee to thy flood again.  The matter is not for thee.
+What harm shall thy honour take of this live dirt?  Thou hast
+given them their fields new year after year, and by thy
+flood they are made strong.  They come all to thee at the last. 
+What need to slay them now?  Have pity, mother, for a little - and
+it is only for a little."
+
+"If it be only for a little," the slow beast began.
+
+
+
+"Are they Gods, then?" Krishna returned with a laugh, his eyes
+looking into the dull eyes of the River.  "Be certain that it is
+only for a little.  The Heavenly Ones have heard thee, and
+presently justice will be done.  Go now, mother, to the flood
+again.  Men and cattle are thick on the waters - the banks fall -
+the villages melt because of thee."
+
+"But the bridge - the bridge stands." The Mugger turned grunting
+into the undergrowth as Krishna rose.
+
+"It is ended," said the Tigress, viciously.  "There is no more
+justice from the Heavenly Ones.  Ye have made shame and sport of
+Gunga, who asked no more than a few score lives."
+
+"Of my people - who lie under the leaf-roofs of the village
+yonder - of the young girls, and the young men who sing to them
+in the dark -of the child that will be born next morn - of that
+which was begotten to-night," said Krishna.  "And when all is
+done, what profit?  To-morrow sees them at work.  Ay, if ye swept
+the bridge out from end to end they would begin anew.  Hear me!
+Bhairon is drunk always.  Hanuman mocks his people with new riddles."
+
+"Nay, but they are very old ones," the Ape said, laughing.
+
+"Shiv hears the talk of the schools and the dreams of the holy
+men; Ganesh thinks only of his fat traders; but I - I live with
+these my people, asking for no gifts, and so receiving them
+hourly."
+
+"And very tender art thou of thy people," said the Tigress.
+
+"They are my own.  The old women dream of me turning in their
+sleep; the maids look and listen for me when they go to fill
+their lotahs by the river.  I walk by the young men waiting
+without the gates at dusk, and I call over my shoulder to the
+white-beards.  Ye know, Heavenly Ones, that I alone of us all
+walk upon the earth continually, and have no pleasure in our
+heavens so long as a green blade springs here, or there are two
+voices at twilight in the standing crops.  Wise are ye, but ye
+live far off; forgetting whence ye came.  So do I not forget. 
+And the fire-carriage feeds your shrines, ye say?  And the fire-
+carriages bring a thousand pilgrims where but ten came in the old
+years?  True.  That is true, to-day."
+
+"But to-morrow they are dead, brother," said Ganesh.
+
+"Peace!" said the Bull, as Hanuman leaned forward again.  "And
+to-morrow, beloved - what of to-morrow?"
+
+"This only.  A new word creeping from mouth to mouth among the
+Common Folk - a word that neither man nor God can lay hold of -
+an evil word - a little lazy word among the Common Folk,
+saying (and none know who set that word afoot) that they weary of
+ye, Heavenly Ones."
+
+The Gods laughed together softly.  "And then, beloved," they said.
+
+"And to cover that weariness they, my people, will bring to thee,
+Shiv, and to thee, Ganesh, at first greater offerings and a
+louder noise of worship.  But the word has gone abroad, and,
+after, they will pay fewer dues to your fat Brahmins.  Next they
+will forget your altars, but so slowly that no man can say how
+his forgetfulness began."
+
+"I knew - I knew!  I spoke this also, but they would not hear,"
+said the Tigress.  "We should have slain-we should have slain!"
+
+"It is too late now.  Ye should have slain at the beginning when
+the men from across the water had taught our folk nothing.  Now
+my people see their work, and go away thinking.  They do not
+think of the Heavenly Ones altogether.  They think of the
+fire-carriage and the other things that the bridge-builders have
+done, and when your priests thrust forward hands asking alms,
+they give a little unwillingly.  That is the beginning, among one
+or two, or five or ten - for I, moving among my people, know what
+is in their hearts."
+
+"And the end, Jester of the Gods?  What shall the end be?" said Ganesh.
+
+"The end shall be as it was in the beginning, O slothful son of Shiv!
+The flame shall die upon the altars and the prayer upon the
+tongue till ye become little Gods again - Gods of the jungle
+- names that the hunters of rats and noosers of dogs whisper in
+the thicket and among the caves -rag-Gods, pot Godlings of the
+tree, and the village-mark, as ye were at the beginning.  That is
+the end, Ganesh, for thee, and for Bhairon - Bhairon of the
+Common People."
+
+"It is very far away," grunted Bhairon.  "Also, it is a lie."
+
+"Many women have kissed Krishna.  They told him this to cheer
+their own hearts when the grey hairs came, and he has told us the
+tale," said the Bull, below his breath.
+
+"Their Gods came, and we changed them.  I took the Woman and made
+her twelve-armed.  So shall we twist all their Gods," said Hanuman.
+
+"Their Gods!  This is no question of their Gods - one or three -
+man or woman.  The matter is with the people.  I move, and not
+the Gods of the bridge-builders," said Krishna.
+
+"So be it.  I have made a man worship the fire-carriage as it stood
+still breathing smoke, and he knew not that he worshipped me,"
+said Hanuman the Ape.  "They will only change a little the names
+of their Gods.  I shall lead the builders of the bridges as
+of old; Shiv shall be worshipped in the schools by such as doubt
+and despise their fellows; Ganesh shall have his mahajuns,
+and Bhairon the donkey-drivers, the pilgrims, and the sellers
+of toys.  Beloved, they will do no more than change the names,
+and that we have seen a thousand times."
+
+"Surely they will do no more than change the names," echoed
+Ganesh; but there was an uneasy movement among the Gods.
+
+"They will change more than the names.  Me alone they cannot
+kill, so long as a maiden and a man meet together or the spring
+follows the winter rains.  Heavenly Ones, not for nothing have I
+walked upon the earth.  My people know not now what they know;
+but I, who live with them, I read their hearts.  Great Kings, the
+beginning of the end is born already.  The fire-carriages shout
+the names of new Gods that are not the old under new names. 
+Drink now and eat greatly!  Bathe your faces in the smoke of the
+altars before they grow cold!  Take dues and listen to the cymbals
+and the drums, Heavenly Ones, while yet there are flowers and
+songs.  As men count time the end is far off; but as we who know
+reckon it is to-day.  I have spoken."
+
+The young God ceased, and his brethren looked at each other long
+in silence.
+
+"This I have not heard before," Peroo whispered in his
+companion's ear.  "And yet sometimes, when I oiled the brasses
+in the engine-room of the Goorkha, I have wondered if our priests
+were so wise - so wise.  The day is coming, Sahib.  They will be
+gone by the morning."
+
+A yellow light broadened in the sky, and the tone of the river
+changed as the darkness withdrew.
+
+Suddenly the Elephant trumpeted aloud as though man had goaded him.
+
+"Let Indra judge.  Father of all, speak thou!  What of the things
+we have heard?  Has Krishna lied indeed?  Or --"
+
+"Ye know," said the Buck, rising to his feet.  "Ye know the
+Riddle of the Gods.  When Brahm ceases to dream, the Heavens and
+the Hells and Earth disappear.  Be content.  Brahm dreams still. 
+The dreams come and go, and the nature of the dreams changes, but
+still Brahm dreams.  Krishna has walked too long upon earth, and
+yet I love him the more for the tale he has told.  The Gods
+change, beloved - all save One!"
+
+"Ay, all save one that makes love in the hearts of men," said
+Krishna, knotting his girdle.  "It is but a little time to wait,
+and ye shall know if I lie.  Truly it is but a little time, as
+thou sayest, and we shall know.  Get thee to thy huts again,
+beloved, and make sport for the young things, for still Brahm
+dreams.  Go, my children!  Brahm dreams and till he wakes the
+Gods die not."
+
+"Whither went they?" said the Lascar, awe-struck, shivering a
+little with the cold.
+
+"God knows!" said Findlayson.  The river and the island lay in
+full daylight now, and there was never mark of hoof or pug on the
+wet earth under the peepul.  Only a parrot screamed in the
+branches, bringing down showers of water-drops as he fluttered
+his wings.
+
+"Up!  We are cramped with cold!  Has the opium died out.
+Canst thou move, Sahib?"
+
+Findlayson staggered to his feet and shook himself.  His bead
+swam and ached, but the work of the opium was over, and, as he
+sluiced his forehead in a pool, the Chief Engineer of the Kashi
+Bridge was wondering how he had managed to fall upon the island,
+what chances the day offered of return, and, above all, how his
+work stood.
+
+"Peroo, I have forgotten much I was under the guard-tower
+watching the river; and then --- Did the flood sweep us away?"
+
+"No.  The boats broke loose, Sahib, and" (if the Sahib had
+forgotten about the opium, decidedly Peroo would not remind him)
+"in striving to retie them, so it seemed to me but it was dark -
+a rope caught the Sahib and threw him upon a boat.  Considering
+that we two, with Hitchcock Sahib, built, as it were, that
+bridge, I came also upon the boat, which came riding on
+horseback, as it were, on the nose of this island, and so,
+splitting, cast us ashore.  I made a great cry when the boat left
+the wharf and without doubt Hitchcock Sahib will come for us.  As
+for the bridge, so many have died in the building that it cannot
+fall." A fierce sun, that drew out all the smell of the sodden
+land, had followed the storm, and in that clear light there was
+no room for a man to think of the dreams of the dark.  Findlayson
+stared upstream, across the blaze of moving water, till his eyes
+ached.  There was no sign of any bank to the Ganges, much less of
+a bridge-line.
+
+"We came down far," he said.  "It was wonderful that we were not
+drowned a hundred times."
+
+"That was the least of the wonder, for no man dies before his
+time.  I have seen Sydney, I have seen London, and twenty great
+ports, but" - Peroo looked at the damp, discoloured shrine under
+the peepul - "never man has seen that we saw here."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Has the Sahib forgotten; or do we black men only see the Gods?"
+
+"There was a fever upon me." Findlayson was still looking
+uneasily across the water.  "It seemed that the island was full
+of beasts and men talking, but I do not remember.  A boat could
+live in this water now, I think."
+
+"Oho!  Then it is true.  'When Brahm ceases to dream, the Gods
+die.' Now I know, indeed, what he meant.  Once, too, the guru
+said as much to me; but then I did not understand.  Now I am wise."
+
+"What?" said Findlayson, over his shoulder.
+
+Peroo went on as if he were talking to himself "Six - seven - ten
+monsoons since, I was watch on the fo'c'sle of the Rewah - the
+Kumpani's big boat - and there was a big tufan; green and black
+water beating, and I held fast to the life-lines, choking under
+the waters.  Then I thought of the Gods - of Those whom we saw
+to-night "- he stared curiously at Findlayson's back, but the
+white man was looking across the flood.  "Yes, I say of Those
+whom we saw this night past, and I called upon Them to protect
+me.  And while I prayed, still keeping my lookout, a big wave
+came and threw me forward upon the ring of the great black
+bow-anchor, and the Rewah rose high and high, leaning towards the
+left-hand side, and the water drew away from beneath her nose,
+and I lay upon my belly, holding the ring, and looking down into
+those great deeps. Then I thought, even in the face of death: If
+I lose hold I die, and for me neither the Rewah nor my place by
+the galley where the rice is cooked, nor Bombay, nor Calcutta,
+nor even London, will be any more for me.  'How shall I be sure,'
+I said,  'that the Gods to whom I pray will abide at all?'  This I
+thought, and the Rewah dropped her nose as a hammer falls, and
+all the sea came in and slid me backwards along the fo'c'sle and
+over the break of the fo'c'sle, and I very badly bruised my shin
+against the donkey-engine: but I did not die, and I have seen the
+Gods. They are good for live men, but for the dead. . . .  They
+have spoken Themselves.  Therefore, when I come to the village I
+will beat the guru for talking riddles which are no riddles. 
+When Brahm ceases to dream the Gods go."
+
+"Look up-stream.  The light blinds.  Is there smoke yonder?"
+
+Peroo shaded his eyes with his hands.  "He is a wise man and
+quick.  Hitchcock Sahib would not trust a rowboat.  He has
+borrowed the Rao Sahib's steam-launch, and comes to look for us.
+I have always said that there should have been a steam-launch on
+the bridge works for us.
+
+The territory of the Rao of Baraon lay within ten miles of the
+bridge; and Findlayson and Hitchcock had spent a fair portion of
+their scanty leisure in playing billiards and shooting blackbuck
+with the young man.  He had been bearled by an English tutor of
+sporting tastes for some five or six years, and was now royally
+wasting the revenues accumulated during his minority by the
+Indian Government.  His steam-launch, with its silver-plated
+rails, striped silk awning, and mahogany decks, was a new toy
+which Findlayson had found horribly in the way when the Rao came
+to look at the bridge works.
+
+"It's great luck," murmured Findlayson, but he was none the less
+afraid, wondering what news might be of the bridge.
+
+The gaudy blue-and-white funnel came downstream swiftly.  They
+could see Hitchcock in the bows, with a pair of opera-glasses,
+and his face was unusually white.  Then Peroo hailed, and the
+launch made for the tail of the island.  The Rao Sahib, in tweed
+shooting-suit and a seven-hued turban, waved his royal hand, and
+Hitchcock shouted.  But he need have asked no questions, for
+Findlayson's first demand was for his bridge.
+
+"All serene!  'Gad, I never expected to see you again, Findlayson.
+You're seven koss downstream.  Yes; there's not a stone shifted
+anywhere; but how are you?  I borrowed the Rao Sahib's launch, and
+he was good enough to come along.  Jump in.  "Ah, Finlinson, you
+are very well, eh?  That was most unprecedented calamity last
+night, eh?  My royal palace, too, it leaks like the devil, and the
+crops will also be short all about my country.  Now you shall
+back her out, Hitchcock.  I - I do not understand steam-engines. 
+You are wet?  You are cold, Finlinson?  I have some things to eat
+here, and you will take a good drink."
+
+"I'm immensely grateful, Rao Sahib.  I believe you've saved my
+life.  How did Hitchcock -"
+
+"Oho!  His hair was upon end.  He rode to me in the middle of the
+night and woke me up in the arms of Morpheus.  I was most truly
+concerned, Finlinson, so I came too.  My head-priest he is very
+angry just now.  We will go quick, Mister Hitchcock.  I am due to
+attend at twelve forty-five in the state temple, where we
+sanctify some new idol.  If not so I would have asked you to
+spend the day with me.  They are dam-bore, these religious
+ceremonies, Finlinson, eh?"
+
+Peroo, well known to the crew, had possessed himself of the
+inlaid wheel, and was taking the launch craftily up-stream.  But
+while he steered he was, in his mind, handling two feet of
+partially untwisted wire-rope; and the back upon which he beat
+was the back of his guru.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg Etext The Bridge-Builders, by Rudyard Kipling
+
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