【英文原著类】The Bridge-Builders(筑桥人).pdf

The Bridge-Builders
The Bridge-Builders
Mark Twain
1
The Bridge-Builders
The least that Findlayson, of the Public Works Department, expected
was a .; he dreamed of a . Indeed, his friends told him that he
deserved more. For three years he had endured heat and cold,
disappointment, fort, 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 e 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 r