Page:Our New Zealand Cousins.djvu/152

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136
Our New Zealand Cousins.

lington boasts the possession of the largest wooden building and the highest wooden viaduct, as is alleged, which the world contains.

The viaduct is raised on sixteen concrete basements. It contains 212,000 superficial feet of kauri timber, and there are thirty-five tons of wrought iron used up in bolts, nuts, washers, and straps alone. At a distance it looks like a gigantic web, or the puzzle of a dreaming geometrician. It is 170 feet in height, above the stream, and the span over the valley is 185 feet. The erection of such enormous lengths gave occasion for a display of fertility of resource on Mr. Danaher's part which is, I think, well worthy of record. It is a sample of what is being done, in hundreds of cases, by our cousins at the Antipodes to conquer nature, and a good illustration of the dogged fight which has to be waged before modern civilization can subdue the wild forces and primæval difficulties which confront the hardy pioneers of progress in these new lands.

All his sections were built on the ground on the side of the hill. The problem was to place them in situ without the aid of ruinously expensive scaffolding, and, at the same time, without undue risk to his workmen. Every log had to be laboriously dragged up steep hill-sides, along the bed of a mountain stream, and over ground which would have daunted the resolution of most men.

How, then, did he manage?

Thus. Having built his section on the ground