Books with title Two Builders, The

Excerpt from The Castle BuildersI would build a cloudy houseFor my thoughts to live in,When for earth too fancy loose,And too low for Heaven.Hush! I talk my dream alone:I build it bright to see;I build it on the moon-lit cloud,To which I looked with theeE. B. Browning.About two o'clock in the afternoon, the yellow foggy light of a spring, or rather winter day in London, came, for it could not be said to shine, through the two windows of a large apartment, which the long table and the numerous desks and books, distinguished as a school-room. Large maps hung against the wall; there was a piano, a pair of globes, sundry drawing desks and easels in the midst of which were nearly a score of girls from twelve years old to seventeen, their gay chatter and bright looks proving how little power the restraints of school had to check their flow of spirits in this hour of relaxation.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

There were labour contractors by the half-hundred - fitters and riveters, European, borrowed from the railway workshops, with, perhaps, twenty white and half-caste subordinates to direct, under direction, the bevies of workmen - but none knew better than these two, who trusted each other, how the underlings were not to be trusted. They had been tried many times in sudden crises - by slipping of booms, by breaking of tackle, failure of cranes, and the wrath of the river. "Never look backwards or you'll fall down the stairs." Bridge Builders (1893) by the British writer Rudyard Kipling is an Indian story about the building of the "Kashi Bridge." The story mainly displays Kipling's mastery of the technical details and knowledge related to bridge building. His biographers agree that the author acquired this knowledge through interacting with British civil engineers who were assigned by the Crown to build numerous bridges in India as part of the industrial movement in British India. The building of the "Kashi" is under the supervision of Engineer Findlayson. At a certain moment, Findlayson is lured into opium consumption and apparently starts to hallucinate. He dreams that the bridge is threatened to be destroyed by Indian gods who consider such a project as a desecration of the natural world. They decide to flood the city and the question that keeps on haunting Findlayson's mind is whether his bridge would survive the natural catastrophe or not. Fortunately for him, the bridge eventually resists the flood. Behind its simple plot, Kipling's story inspires serious philosophical and existential questions related to the duality between science and the spiritual. Symbolically speaking, Findlayson's project stands for an atheist man's belief in materialistic reality and scientific progress in the face of a traditional and spiritual India that resists all acts of desecration. Findlayson himself is aware that his triumph over Indian gods is only temporary as the bridge will one day or another disappear and all men will be ultimately vanquished by death without solving the question of eternity. (cover photograph courtesy of Subhadip Mukherjee)

Joseph Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 - 18 January 1936) was an English author and poet. He is regarded as a major "innovator in the art of the short story"; his children's books are enduring classics of children's literature; and his best works speak to a versatile and luminous narrative gift. Kipling was one of the most popular writers in English, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English language writer to receive the prize, and to date he remains its youngest recipient.