However, another criss-cross bridge in Kashmír ought to be studied in photographs; it is carried on six piers over the Jhelum at Baramula—quite close to the Himalayas; the piers rise from boat-shaped platforms that meet the oncoming water as boats do, with their blunt stems looking brave as rearguards. The parapet is a simple latticework, and the abutments are masonry. Here we have a type of bridge perhaps quite similar to the one from which the Gauls got their rude methods, long after the craft of the lake-dwellers had left its sheltered moorings and adventured across wide rivers.
Is there any concrete evidence to suggest that the bridge with criss-cross piers has gone through many phases of change, of growth or of decadence? Yes. At Archangel, in North Russia, the criss-cross piers are more primitive; instead of being arched they are upright and stiff; but as the bridge is nearly a quarter of a mile long, and as it is taken down every spring (before the ice breaks up noisily, and the Dwina thunders into a raging torrent), crude workmanship in a hurried routine is excusable. The main point is that a bridge akin to the Gaulish type and to the variation in Kashmir exists in North Russia.
And another variation is met with at Bhutan, in India. Brangwyn has drawn it, and we shall study it later in a page on gateway-towers ([p. 272]). In the highlands of Eastern Kurdistan, the borderland of Asiatic Turkey and Persia, travellers find a bridge akin to the Bhutan variety. An excellent book on these highlands has been published, [20] and its authors, very generously, have written for me some valuable notes on the bridges. Before I quote them in full, let me ask you to remember that in Eastern Kurdistan timber is uncommon; hence the criss-cross bridge has been evolved into another sort of primitive structure—a third cousin, several times removed. A Kurdistan bridge is built as follows: “A site is selected, if one can be found, where two immovable and flat-topped masses of rock face one another across the stream to be bridged: an abutment of unhewn stones is built on these, solid, until a height has been reached sufficient to be safe from any flood.
“Then a bracket of four or more rows of poplar trunks is constructed on each abutment; short stout trunks form the bottom row, and those of each succeeding one are naturally longer than the preceding. Unless the bridge is unusually wide in the footway four poplars are enough to form a row, and the butts of the trees, which are kept shore-wards, are weighted down with big stones as counter-weights to hold them in place.
“The top of each row of trunks projects perhaps five feet beyond the preceding one, so that when a bracket of four rows is completed, it may project perhaps twenty feet over the stream.
“When the corresponding bracket has been completed, two long poplar trunks are slung by withies from bracket end to bracket end, a footway of withy hurdles, resting on faggots, is laid down over all, and the bridge is complete. The length of this centre span is of course limited by the height of the poplars available. I should think fifty feet the extreme possible.
“If the width of the river makes it necessary, one or more piers of stone,—I have seen as many as three,—are erected in midstream, preferably on rock foundations. Each of these carries a bracket on each side, but this double bracket is usually made of ‘whole trunks’ and these naturally need no counter-weighting.
“As a rule the footway is about four feet wide, and the whole structure is very elastic, so that, as it is guiltless of handrails, it requires a steady head in the passenger. Further, the central span often acquires a pronounced ‘sag,’ and not seldom an equally pronounced tilt to one side or other. Ancient rule says that the passenger ought not to look down in crossing such a place, lest the sight of water whirling below should unnerve him. In Kurdistan, however, look down he must, and make the best of the hurdles that form the footway; they abound in holes and other traps for the unwary, and a stumble may mean disaster. These bridges, then, though admirably planned (for they are true cantilevers), are not built in the most convenient manner. It is characteristically Oriental, this union of real fineness of design with great casualness in construction and in upkeep. The piers are invariably of stone, never of wood. Good timber is almost unknown in Kurdistan. The poplar grows well, but it is at best only a good pole. Stone, on the other hand, is embarrassingly abundant.
“Dry-stone arches are thrown over smaller streams, but their builders, though acquainted with the principle of the vault, do not venture on a span of more than thirty feet!”[21]
How do you like the antiquity of conventions? Does it not make you feel that the greatest part of mankind has never shown a particle of desire that its civil institutions should be improved? Note, too, that convention among men is inferior to the instinct of animals, for animals invariably repeat themselves with a passionate interest, whereas we in our formulas grow more and more unfeeling and automatic. Even rabbits when they dig their burrows seem to be guided by inspiration, as if routine work with them is an appetite, like love and hunger; so very different are they from the conservative peasants of Savoy, whose dull routine has delivered down through the centuries a primeval bridge which an hour’s thought could have improved.