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. An amusing incident occurred
one day when I was taking a photograph of an
enormous block of stone which was being hauled
across one of these temporary bridges. As the
trolley with its heavy load required very careful
manipulation, my head mason, Heera Singh,
stood on the top of the stone to direct operations,
while the overseer, Purshotam Hurjee,
superintended the gangs of men who hauled the ropes
at either end in order to steady it up and down
the inclines.
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