On One Occasion In
Particular, I Went A Long Way Up The River And Was
Accompanied By A Young Member
Of my staff.
The day had been exceedingly hot and we were
both correspondingly tired when our work was
finished,
So my companion suggested that we
should build a raft and float down-stream home.
I was rather doubtful, of the feasibility of the
scheme, but nevertheless he decided to give it a
trial. Setting to work with our axes, we soon
had a raft built, lashing the poles together with
the fibre which grows in abundance all over the
district. When it was finished, we pushed it
out of the little backwater where it had been
constructed, and the young engineer jumped
aboard. All went well until it got out into
midstream, when much to my amusement it
promptly toppled gracefully over. I helped my
friend to scramble quickly up the bank out of
reach of possible crocodiles, when, none the worse
for his ducking, he laughed as heartily as I at
the adventure.
Except for an occasional relaxation of this
sort, every moment of my time was fully occupied.
Superintending the various works and a hundred
other duties kept me busy all day long, while my
evenings were given up to settling disputes
among the coolies, hearing reports and complaints
from the various jemadars and workpeople, and
in studying the Swahili language. Preparations,
too, for the principal piece of work in the district
- the building of the railway bridge over the
Tsavo river - were going on apace. These
involved, much personal work on my part; cross
and oblique sections of the river had to be taken,
the rate of the current and the volume of water
at flood, mean, and low levels had to be found,
and all the necessary calculations made. These
having at length been completed, I marked out
the positions for the abutments and piers, and
the work of sinking their foundations was begun.
The two centre piers in particular caused a great
deal of trouble, as the river broke in several
times, and had to be dammed up and pumped dry
again before work could be resumed. Then we
found we had to sink much deeper than we
expected in order to reach a solid foundation
indeed, the sinking went on and on, until I
began to despair of finding one and was about
to resort to pile-driving, when at last, to my
relief, we struck solid rock on which the huge
foundation-stones could be laid with perfect
safety.
Another great difficulty with which we had
to contend was the absence of suitable stone in
the neighbourhood. It was not that there was
none to be found, for the whole district abounds
in rock, but that it was so intensely hard as to
be almost impossible to work, and a bridge built
of it would have been very costly. I spent many
a weary day trudging through the thorny
wilderness vainly searching for suitable material, and
was beginning to think that we should be forced
to use iron columns for the piers, when one day
I stumbled quite by accident on the very thing.
Brock and I were out "pot-hunting," and hearing
some guinea-fowl cackling among the bushes, I
made a circuit half round them so that Brock,
on getting in his shot, should drive them over in
my direction. I eventually got into position on
the edge of a deep ravine and knelt on one knee,
crouching down among the ferns. There I had
scarcely time to load when over flew a bird,
which I missed badly; and I did not have
another chance, for Brock had got to work, and
being a first-rate shot had quickly bagged a
brace. Meanwhile I felt the ground very hard
under my knee, and on examination found that
the bank of the ravine was formed of stone, which
extended for some distance, and which was
exactly the kind of material for which I had
long been fruitlessly searching. I was greatly
delighted with my unexpected discovery, though
at first I had grave misgivings about the distance
to be traversed and the difficulty of transporting
the stone across the intervening country. Indeed,
I found in the end that the only way of getting
the material to the place where it was wanted
was by laying down a tram line right along
the ravine, throwing a temporary bridge across
the Tsavo, following the stream down and
re-crossing it again close to the site of the
permanent bridge. Accordingly, I set men to work
at once to cut down the
jungle and prepare a
road on which to lay
the double trolley line.
One morning when they
were thus engaged, a
little paa - a kind of
very small antelope -
sprang out and found
itself suddenly in the
midst of a gang of
coolies. Terrified and confused by the shouting
of the men, it ran straight at Shere Shah, the
jemadar, who promptly dropped a basket over
it and held it fast. I happened to arrive just in
time to save the graceful little animal's life, and
took it home to my camp, where it very soon
became a great pet. Indeed, it grew so tame
that it would jump upon my table at meal times
and eat from my hand.
When the road for the trolley line was cleared,
the next piece of work was the building of the
two temporary bridges over the river. These
we made in the roughest fashion out of palm
trees and logs felled at the crossing places, and
had a flood come down they would, of course,
have both been swept away; fortunately, however,
this did not occur until the permanent work was
completed. The whole of this feeding line was
finished in a very short time, and trollies were
soon plying backwards and forwards with loads
of stone and sand, as we also discovered the
latter in abundance and of good quality in the
bed of the ravine.
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