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THE DAY'S WORK
by Rudyard Kipling
CONTENTS
THE BRIDGE-BUILDERS
A WALKING DELEGATE
THE SHIP THAT FOUND HERSELF
THE TOMB OF HIS ANCESTORS
THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP SEA
WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR
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THE MALTESE CAT
BREAD UPON THE WATERS
AN ERROR IN THE FOURTH DIMENSION
MY SUNDAY AT HOME
THE BRUSHWOOD BOY
THE BRIDGE-BUILDERS
The least that Findlayson, of the Public Works Department, expected was a C. I. E.; he dreamed of a C. S. I.: indeed, his friends told him that he deserved more. For three years he had endured heat and cold, disappointment, discomfort, danger, and disease, with responsibility almost too heavy for one pair of shoulders; and day by day, through that time, the great Kashi Bridge over the Ganges had grown under his charge. Now, in less than three months, if all went well, his Excellency the Viceroy would open the bridge in state, an archbishop would bless it, and the first trainload of soldiers would come over it, and there would be speeches.
Findlayson, C. E., sat in his trolley on a construction line that ran along one of the main revetments - the huge stone-faced banks that flared away north and south for three miles on either side of the river - and permitted himself to think of the end. With its approaches, his work was one mile and three-quarters fin length; a lattice-girder bridge, trussed with the Findlayson truss, standing on seven-and-twenty brick pies. Each one of those piers was twenty-four feet in diameter, capped with red Agra stone and sunk eighty feet below the shifting sand of the Ganges' bed. Above them was a railway-line fifteen feet broad; above that, again, a cart-roa