It was a bold design and one seemingly impossible of achievement, and yet it has been done. Many of the slabs are seventy feet long, six feet in thickness and about four feet in width. As you slowly tread your way over them and try and pace out their length, they appear Titanic in their dimensions, and the question that is most often in the mouths of the visitors who have come to witness this great engineering feat is how ever did the builders manage two hundred years ago not simply to cut such huge blocks of granite from the mountain side, but also to place them in the position they have occupied for two centuries at least. This question is one that was easily answered by the untaught architects, who, without any other guidance than their own common-sense and their general knowledge of building, had undertaken to throw a bridge over a stream that depended for its moods on the changeful, fitful temper of the elements. They first of all built their piers in the river when the water was at its lowest. They waited till the winter months, when the north-east monsoon had driven the winds in wild confusion far down into the South, and the mountain streams were dry, and the current flowed in a sluggish, indolent stream. [Illustration: A FAMOUS BRIDGE. _To face p. 361._] They then began to quarry out the mighty slabs that were to make the roadway of the bridge, and that should be so weighty as to be able to resist the fierce onrush of waters when the river, maddened by the storms, flung itself down the gorges and, flecked with foam, careered in wild confusion towards the sea. The hills near by that ran down to the very edge of the water abounded with stone exactly suited for the purpose, and as the proper lengths were chiselled out of the hillsides, they were deftly slid down on rollers and placed on rafts that were moored by the edge of the shore. Here they were allowed to rest in peace and quietness until some great downpour filled the rivulets and the mountain streams and the thousand and one tributaries that sent their gurgling, gathering forces to swell the waters of the main river. Men with keen and eager watch marked the rise of the tide, and when it was found that the flood had risen higher than the tops of the piers, the huge rafts with their mighty cargoes were skilfully guided down the flowing river, and the slabs having been moored in the position they were to occupy as parts of the roadway of the bridge, the workmen waited for the fall of the waters, when they each subsided into the exact place they were intended to fill. The river itself was thus made the engineering force by which at a comparative little cost and at no very great expense of labour, those huge masses of stone, that no hydraulic power in the world could have lifted into position, were placed in the very simplest manner where they have remained for more than two hundred years.