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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.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Bridge-Builders, by Rudyard Kipling
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