falling radiance disclosed
no detail of the swelling plains below, yet each tumid roll, crowned
with its aureole of lustrous light voiced with tongueless words an
everlasting peace.

Winston was busy until far into the night. There was a strange sense of
oppression as he passed from point to point of the now completed dam.
The machinery that had for so long a time been pulsing with life, was
now stilled. There were no banked fires under the boilers, to speak of
rest for the labor of the morrow, for the labor was completed. In the
laborer's camp, the men were packing their few belongings for an early
start in the morning. Some were busy touching up the machines for their
long rest. These were not to be dismantled at once, but were to wait a
more convenient time. The lanterns of the men twinkled through clumps of
mountain pine where the shadows lay thick and deep; then faded to a dim
point in the white moonlight. The occasional clink of a hammer, and the
voices of the men drifted across the water, softened by distance. It was
funereal, after all! And he had looked forward to these very sounds with
an impatient thrill. Now it was all completed. The last stone of the dam
had been laid, from the dam to the terminal canal every gate had been
put in, every trestle had been built, every tunnel had been driven.
Tomorrow, with the men, he would go over every foot of the canal for a
final inspection. If this was satisfactory, and he knew it would be, in
two days the gates would be opened and the water turned into the canal.

Winston was standing on the apron of the dam looking out over the great
reservoir that in the moonlight lay like a plate of burnished steel
between the pine-clad granite hills that dipped steeply into the water.
The dam was already filled to the brim, and the full volume of the
Sangre de Cristo was sweeping through the weir and plunging into the
canyon below. The sights and sounds only deepened Winston's oppression.
His work was done; the work he loved so well. The future held nothing so
bright as the past had held. Only, in the future, was there to be the
dull routine of office work, the laying off of orange groves, the
running out of ditches that would lead the water to them; simple work
this that any tyro who could set a level and read an angle, could
perform. No intricate problems that absorbed every energy of an active
mind, that blotted out consciousness of time and self in delicious
oblivion of existen