Page:The Marquess of Dalhousie.djvu/205

Rh realize the difficulties which Lord Dalhousie had to encounter and which he overcame, we must again go back to the descriptions written while the sense of the achievement was still fresh.

Lord Dalhousie's telegraph makers were no skilled engineers, but such men as he could lay his hand on, with a Calcutta doctor as their chief. 'He had a field for experiment,' wrote Sir Edwin Arnold a quarter of a century ago, 'subject to electric storms and perturbations, unknown in Europe: a soil alternately baked into one electrical condition, and sodden into another; winds that would lay the telegraph posts in England across the lines from Birmingham to London in a night: little timber, less iron, no skilled labour, no appliances at starting, and — the white ant. The ground which he selected to begin upon, on the principle of measuring difficulty by its maximum, was a lake from June to December, and a wilderness of fissured clay from December to June... His posts had to pass through jungles, where wild beasts used them for scratching-stations, and savages stole them for firewood and rafters for huts. Inquisitive monkeys spoiled the work ... by dragging the lines into festoons, or dangling an ill-conducting tail from wire to wire. Crows, kites and fishing eagles made roosting-places of the lines in numbers so great as to bring them to the ground; though once or twice a flash of lightning, striking a wet wire, would