BRIDGE OF BOATS AT COLOGNE
CHAPTER THE FIRST
ON THE STUDY OF BRIDGES AND ROADS
I
GENERAL VIEWS
A pontist, or devotee of bridges, ought to be envied and pitied; his work is marvellously attractive, but he cannot hope to learn even a twentieth part of the discoverable history which has circulated along highways. Indeed, the history goes back to a time that preceded the descent of man; a primal time when every bridge was made by Nature, and when footpaths and tracks were the runs and spoor of wild animals, many of which were huge enough to plough their way through deep jungles and to trample wide paths through the undergrowth of virgin forests. There were eight or nine sorts of natural bridge ([p. 113]), and they were all useful to the many quadrupeds that travelled far in their search for prey and forage. To meditate on this fact is to visualise many probable happenings; vivid pictures live before the mind’s eye, and in one I see how a full-grown Iguanodon, after gorging all day in a ravaged weald, was overcome by the sleep of glutted hunger as he tried to cross a big fallen tree that bridged a chasm near by his lair under a rock-shelter; and a flock of little bright birds came and settled on the seventy feet of body and tail, just to pick up vermin. Why not? Life everywhere has fed on lives; something has died, and suffered a resurrection of vitality, whenever appeased hunger has renewed the health of an organism; and this picture of an edacious Iguanodon and his bird friends attracts me for two reasons: it reminds me that bridges throughout their history have circulated strife, and it represents the perpetual law of battle that rules creatively over all living creatures, like foul manure over gardens and harvest fields.
A pontist, then, must try to see clearly, under a form of visual conception, what part his subject played in the earliest war of organic life, when natural bridges aided the first animals not only to hunt over great territories, but to migrate from their first homes into lands very far away. In the second chapter we shall try to feel the inspiring pressure of events which must have acted during the descent of man on a brain remarkable for its imitative faculties. Perhaps we can get into imaginative touch with our earliest ancestors; perhaps we can find in ourselves a vestige of their aboriginal nature; and then we shall know, by a sympathy which we shall not question, how each natural bridge helped them in their wanderings, and became a model to be copied, and adapted, and improved.
Such is the beginning of our enviable studies, but their end is never reached. Not even the long days and years of Hilpa and Shalum, in Addison, where antediluvian seconds endure about as long as our trivial minutes, would be enough for a complete study of bridges and roads, viewed as inestimable servants to the commonweal of mankind. A complete study would follow their evolution through eight world-wide subjects: architecture, civil engineering, antiquarian research, the development of trade and commerce from primitive barter, social wayfaring, war and its red tragedies, the longevity of barbaric customs, usages, traditions, and the ups and downs of fortune in the slow fever called progress, whose clinical thermometer has been tribal and national enterprise, and whose gradual effects on the temperature of bodies civil have produced many withering crises fatal to civilizations.