The Bridge-Builders by Rudyard Kipling — Read

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.