“Many years ago workmen under their master were set to build the bridge; three times the bridge fell, and the workmen said, ‘The bridge needs a life.’ And the master saw a beautiful girl, accompanied by a bitch and her puppies, and he said, ‘We will give the first [life] that comes by.’ But the dog and her little ones hung back, so the girl was built alive into the bridge, and only her hand with a gold bracelet upon it was left outside.
“At the foot of this bridge I found the local Agha, Yussuf Pasha, superintending the collection of the sheep-tax, in which as a large landowner he has an interest.”
Try to visualise in all their details these pictures, passing from to-day’s tax-gatherer, a Pasha Lloyd George, into the drama of a very terrible superstition. The workmen can be fitted with fairly good primitive characters, for they do not suggest the sacrifice of a life until the bridge has fallen thrice. As to their master, he is a fiend, since he acts upon their suggestion at once, unmoved by the girl’s beauty and the frisking springtime that accompanies her. A little dead hand—and a gleaming bracelet—and the masons chanting at their work, as bridge-builders chant now in Persia: so the drama ends, or so it would end if we could not unite it with a similar legend known almost everywhere in Europe.
Why in the Turkish story the workmen say, “The bridge needs a life,” I do not know. Their superstition goes away from the river and its evil spirits, and from those other demons, which in olden times made winds so variable. Are we then to suppose that men have defiled the charity of bridges with bad spirits other than those that live in wilted conventions and in modern engineers? I prefer to believe that a bridge that fell three times would muddle the superstition of any workman. In fact, there are many bridges which superstition—not modesty in men—has given to the Devil, and as a rule they have been connected with the same legend, or bogie tale. Mr. Baring-Gould takes a great interest in the bridges ascribed to the Devil, and writes about them as follows in his “Book of South Wales”:—
PONT DU DIABLE, ST. GOTTHARD PASS
“The Devil’s Bridge is twelve miles from Aberystwyth; it is over the Afon Mynach just before its junction with the Rheidol[17].... The original bridge was constructed by the monks of Strata Florida, at what time is unknown, but legend says it was built by the Devil.
Old Megan Llandunach, of Pont-y-Mynach,
Had lost her only cow;