the mouth of the waiting gabion. Then he returned with his empty basket
down the hill to the quary.
As each gabion was filled, another team fitted the mesh lid and laced it
closed with heavy eight-gauge wire.
'Twenty dollars bonus to the team with the most baskets filled
today!'Nicholas bellowed. They shouted with glee and redoubled their
efforts, but they were unable to keep up with Sapper on the Contender.
He laid his stone piers artfully, working out from the shallow water
alongside the bank so that each gabion lay against its neighbour, keying
into the wall to give mutual support.
At first there was little evident progress, but as a solid reef was
built up beneath the surface the river began to react savagely. The
voice of the water changed from a low rustle to a dull roar as it tore
at Sapper's wall.
Soon the top of the wall of gabions thrust its head above the surface,
and the river was constricted to half its former width. Now its mood was
truculent. It poured through the gap in a solid green torrent, and crept
almost imperceptibly up the banks as it was forced to back up behind the
barriers The rive worried the foundations of the dam, clawing at it to
find its weak spots, and the progress of the work slowed down as the
waters rose higher.
Up in the river in forests along the banks the axemen were at work, and
Nicholas winced each time one of the great trees toppled, groaning and
shrieking like a living creature. He liked to think of himself as a
conservationist, and some of these trees had taken centuries to reach
this girth.
'Do you want your bleeding dam, or your pretty trees?' Sapper demanded
ferociously, when Nicholas lamented in his hearing. Nicholas turned away
without replying.
They were all becoming tired with the unremitting labour. Their nerves
were stretching towards snapping point, and tempers were mercurial.
Already there had been a number of murderous fights amongst the workmen,
and each time Nicholas had been forced to duck in under the swinging
steel mattocks to break it up and separate the combatants.
lowly they squeezed the' river in its bed as the pier crept out from the
bank, and the time came when they had to transfer their efforts to the
far bank. It required the combined efforts of their entire labour force
to build a new road along the bank as far as the ford.
There they manhandled the front-ender into the water, and, with a
hundred men hauling on the tow ropes and her tall lugged rear wheels
spinning and churning the surface to a froth they. dragged her across.
Then they had to build another road back along the far bank to reach the
dam site. They cut out the treetrunks that obstructed them and levered
the boulders out of the way to get the tractor through, Once they had
her back at the dam site they could begin the same process of laying out
gabions from the far bank.
Gradually, a few metres each day, the two walls crept closer to each
other, and as the gap between them narrowed the water rose higher and
became more raucous, making the work more difficult.
In the meanwhile, two hundred metres upstream of the dam site, the
