in Burma came to put them together the tangle of
beams and rods, of trusses and braces should be assembled into a
perfect, orderly structure--each part in its place and each doing its
share of the work.

With men trained to work with ropes and tackle collected from an Indian
seaport, and native riveters gathered from another place, Mr. J.C. Turk,
the engineer in charge, set to work with the American bridgemen and the
constructing engineer to build a bridge out of the pieces of steel that
lay in heaps along the brink of the gorge. First, the traveller, or
derrick, shipped from America in sections, was put together, and its
long arm extended from the end of the tracks on which it ran over the
abyss.

From above the great steel beams were lowered to the masonry foundations
of the first tower and securely bolted to them, and so, piece by piece,
the steel girders were suspended in space and swung this way and that
until each was exactly in its proper position and then riveted
permanently. The great valley resounded with the blows of hammers on
red-hot metal, and the clangour of steel on steel broke the silence of
the tropic wilderness. The towers rose up higher and higher, until the
tops were level with the rim of the valley, and as they were completed
the horizontal girders were built on them, the rails laid, and the
traveller pushed forward until its arm swung over the foundation of the
next tower.

And so over the deep valley the slender structure gradually won its way,
supporting itself on its own web as it crawled along like a spider.
Indeed, so tall were its towers and so slender its steel cords and beams
that from below it appeared as fragile as a spider's web, and the men,
poised on the end of swinging beams or standing on narrow platforms
hundreds of feet in air, looked not unlike the flies caught in the web.

The towers, however, were designed to sustain a heavy train and
locomotive and to withstand the terrific wind of the monsoon. The
pressure of such a wind on a 320-foot tower is tremendous. The bridge
was completed within the specified time and bore without flinching all
the severe tests to which it was put. Heavy trains--much heavier than
would ordinarily be run over the viaduct--steamed slowly across the
great steel trestle while the railroad engineers examined with utmost
care every section that would be likely to show weakness. But the
designers had planned well, the steel-workers had done their full d