Soaring, splendid, slender, strong, its arches spanning the tumbling river beneath, the great bridge ran like a rainbow from mountain to mountain. Lovat thought of it, with its lightness, its perfection, its spurning of the ground, as a spirit that crossed with winged unwetted feet the challenging river beneath. It suggested, somehow, Artemis in the dusk, with a tongue of fire above her proud brow.
The wonder and the miracle of it never failed to thrill him. All the harsh practical details of his work, details of thrust and strain, of fitting springer to pier, and voussoir to springer, of the curve of intrados, of the strength of abutments, never took away from him the sense that he had done, was doing, a great and practical thing. These mountains, that composition of jungle, that smashing drop to the turbulent river, the snarling waters themselves—all these were the work of the Great Mason, the detail of his Divine Hand. So they were when and so they had remained since the heavens and the earth were finished and all the host of them, and He rested on the seventh day from all the work which He had made.
But a day would come, the Master of the Masons knew and had ordained, when the welter of passionate nature would subside, and the small race of mankind He had fashioned would reach a place of progress in their journey when this would have to be bridged. Then one of His prentice men would do it. And Lovat experienced a sense of holiness that he had been the chosen one.
Lovat looked at the bridge with wonder and with pride each time he returned, but each time he returned he felt somehow that the bridge had been jealous of his absence, resented it, became temperamental as a woman. Whilst he was there everything was right. There were accidents, of course, but they were the recognized risks of a great venture, the ordinary failure of the human factor in a Titanic equation. But when he was away strange things happened. Now an unaccountable error in laying this or that, now a sudden collapse of machinery, now a terrible accident to the native workmen. But when he was there, all was well. It seemed as if the bridge demanded all his time, all his talent, all his attention.
It occurred to him there was a sort of contest between him and the bridge, a sort of quiet, deadly fight, as between a man and a spirited horse he is riding in a steeplechase. He felt, too, that all the strange things about him knew it—the surly river, the whispering jungle, the majestic mountains, the cold observant stars. These could tell him what it was, for they had observed all things, seeing history begin and peoples fade and nations rise. They had seen great prehistoric animals flap wings terrible and dark as a demon's. They had seen these things die and be forgotten. They were of nature and knew humanity, and they could tell him, if they wished.
But they told nothing. They observed the cruel law of silence, which all nature knows and dead men learn. The business was his and the bridge's. Let the twain fight it out.
"I 'm getting morbid, up here in the mountains," Lovat complained, and he turned abruptly to think of a month from now, when Cecily would come south from New York to marry him in Cartagena, and to be with him for the last days before the bridge was opened. Her dark, serious eyes and cloudy hair and serious smiling mouth were before him, but the shadow of the bridge rose between him and the vision of her like a barred door....