PART TWO
I
RAILHEAD
But something was coming to Llanyglo.
As Edward Garden might have said, looking at this something under his glasses and over his glasses as it crept slowly up out of the east—as Edward Garden might have said, looking at it again and yet again, and then gazing mildly and mistrustfully through the glasses at you, it appeared to be a railway.
At any rate, if it was not coming to Llanyglo it was coming within three miles of it.
As if a snail should leave behind it a track, not of slime, but of new iron, grey at first, then red with rust, but soon to be bright again, so it came on; and in other respects also it resembled a snail. It carried, for example, its lodging with it. And it put forward sensitive and intelligent antennæ as it sought its food thirty miles away down the coast—manganese. It left the junction half a mile beyond Porth Neigr, and it was going to Abercelyn.
The lodging that the snail carried with it was called Railhead. Seen from a distance of a couple of miles it resembled a small excoriation on the face of the land; seen nearer it resolved itself into a town of wood and corrugated iron, with stockades of creosoted sleepers and trenches of earth and ramparts of ballast and metal for the laying of the permanent way. There were superintendents' offices and the sheds of clerks of works; there were forges and stables and strings of waggons and a telegraph cabin; there were huts and pumping-stations and cranes, stationary and travelling, and a gas-plant; and there were watchmen's boxes and the temporary dwellings of hundreds of men. By day these could be seen, spread out on the level or clustering about the embankments as the flies clustered about the treacled strings and fly-papers Howell Gruffydd hung up in his shop in Llanyglo; at night the oncoming snail seemed phosphorescent, its phosphorescence the flares and fires and lamps in cabin-windows and red eyes for danger that appeared when the other shift took over the work from the men of the day. Whistle of construction-engine and roar of dynamite cartridge; hiss of steam and clang of hammers as they fished the joints; rattle of road-metal as it was shot from the carts, and thud of the paviors' rammers; clank of couplings and agonised scream of a circular saw; purr of telephone-bells and the "Hallo!" as the clerk took down the receiver; sough of pumps and bubbling of cauldrons of tar; cries to horses, slish and slap of mortar and the clinking of the trowels; spitting of dinners cooking over the firebaskets, sounds of singing at night; with these and a hundred other noises the snail crept on with a spirit-level inside him—the level that kept him true to the line that had been laid down by staff and chain and theodolite a couple of years before.
And in some respects that something that looked so very much like a railway resembled not so much a snail as a snake. Did you ever see the great python that died lately at the Zoo climb his ragged staff of a tree? Not a joint or section of him but seemed to have that separate life of each of Dafydd Dafis's fingers when he mourned over his harp. A yard, two yards of the gorgeous waist-thick creature would ripple and flow and roll upwards to the crutch of the stump; another yard would follow, piling ever up and up; and you would wait for the toppling over of the great golden reticulated cable. And then all motion in that portion of the great fake would suddenly cease. Beyond the stump you would become aware that another glittering section was a-crawl, balancing, making fast, ever continuing the ascent.... Even so, before and behind Railhead, the work progressed. At a point the construction-engine stopped, the regiment of red and blue shirts and wondrous forearms and corduroy would move off, and presently all the life of the line would be five miles ahead, where they dug and built and drained and by and by passed back the word that all was well. So they moved, between the finished and tested line at one point and the warning bell and the dynamite stick at the other; and there was an end of much gorse and heath and of many banks of flowering campion and hassocks of wild thyme.