Three Arched Bridge

46

THE LAST CONTINGENT of workmen left three days later. They loaded on carts the heavy tools, great mortar barrels, and all kinds of scrap iron and wheels that creaked endlessly. They lifted the architect’s sick assistant onto a covered cart, hiding him from people’s view, because they said that his appearance was not for human eyes.

The deserted sandbank resembled a ruin, an eyesore with half-destroyed sheds stripped of everything of value, fragments of plank thrown anywhere, traces of mortar, piles of shattered stones, carelessly discarded broken tools, ditches, and lime pits half filled with water. The right bank of the Ujana looked disfigured forever,

Before he boarded his cart, the master-in-chief, who seemed to notice that I was watching their departure, left his people and came up to me, apparently to bid farewell He said nothing but merely drew a piece of card from his jacket, Scribbling some figures on it with a bit of lead, he began to explain to me, I do not know why, the balancing forces that held the bridge upright, My eyes opened wide, because I had not the slightest knowledge of such things, while he went on in his broken language, thinking that he was explaining to me what the forces and opposing forces were.

Late that afternoon the last cart left, and a frightening silence descended, 1 still had in my hand the draftsman’s card, covered with lines and figures, which perhaps did show the forces that kept the bridge upright and those trying to bring it down. The setting sun gleamed obliquely on the arches, which at last found a broken reflection in the waters, and at that moment the bridge resembled a meaningless dream, dreamed by the river and both riverbanks together. So alien, dropped by the river-banks into time, it looked totally solitary as it gripped in its stone limbs its only prey, Murrash Zenebisha, the man who died to allay the enmity of land and water.