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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. |
This is from “The Bridge-builders” (1895) , collected in The Day’s Work. It tells how a vast new bridge over the Ganges, nearing completion, is threatened by a great and unexpected flood. The bridge, spanning the sacred river, survives – just, despite the hostility of some of the old Gods of India. Others are indifferent: ‘It is but the shifting of a little dirt. Let the dirt dig in the dirt if it pleases the dirt.’, says Ganesha, the wise and much revered Elephant God. |
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