Engineering Wonders of the World
Volume III

240 ENGINEERING WONDERS OF THE WORLD. to believe, that when the British Government is about to commence new work, especially if it be a work of some magni- Native tudej that the heads of human Superstition. . ,. _ . 1 . victims are buried below the foundations, the heads having been collected beforehand by emissaries of the Government or the engineers. On one occasion there was a scare of this kind in Dinapore, near Patna, at the inception of a certain scheme. The the Sikh nation, in which lies the holy city of Umritsir. The works were commenced in 1850, and now irrigate over 1,000,000 acres. During the early period of the annexation of the Punjab large bodies of disbanded Sikh soldiers constituted a possible source of trouble to the authorities, and to give them employ- ment and permanent homes this canal was projected and completed in part by 1859. At that time the canal had no proper head- SLUICES OF THE BARI DOAB CANAL, UP-STREAM SIDE. natives gravely asserted that an order had gone forth for human heads, and that the soldiers of the neighbouring garrison were kill- ing men to obtain the necessary material. They were so convinced of the truth of the story as not to dare to stir out at night unless two or three went together. Such scares as this have occurred more than once, and may serve as examples of some of the minor difficulties with which the engineer has to contend. The Bari Doab Canal, in the Punjab, which we will consider next, was one the first of th© large irri- gation works undertaken by British engineers. It waters the tract lying between the Bias and the Ravi—th© cradle of works, and the control of the water was in- efficient. So permanent head-works were com- menced during 1868, when a weir was built across the river Ravi, which supplies the canal. At the site of the off-take th© Ravi has a bed of boulders of coarse shingle and a fall of about 20 feet in the mile. In the dry season the river winds from side to side of the broad bed, a limpid, shallow, swift cur- rent of little width. When the snows melt and the monsoon rains fall on the hills, it becomes an angry, turbid flood, by which the heavy boulders in the bed are borne along. Across this river the engineers built a weir rising only 3 feet above the bed. High floods rise about 10 feet over t'he crest. The wall is built of boulders set in good mortar.