History of Mediaeval Hindu India (being a History of India from 600 to 1200 A.D.) v1.c17.14

v1.c17.14

But the skill of Orissa ancient engineers is still more exhibited in the bridge which they have built over the southern branch of the Mahānadi. "The earlier kings of the Kesari line held their court sometimes at Bhuvaneśvara the city of temples to Śiva and sometimes at Jaipur the city of his priests on the holy river. But a warlike prince who reigned from 953 to 961 A. D. perceived the military strengh of the tongue of land where the Mahānadi first divides itself into several branches and founded Cuttack which is still the capital of the province. He shut up the river by means of a masonry embankment, several miles long, which at present consists of enormous blocks of hewn stone in some places 25 feet high. His successor strengthened the new capital by an outlying fortress on the southern bank of the river, while a century later the reigning king built the massive bridge by which pilgrims enter Puri at this day. The bridge consists of masses of red stone called laterite (which is soft when first quarried but grows harder by exposure to the air) and spans 290 feet of water-way by means of eighteen arches the central one being 18 feet high by fourteen feet broad. "The Hindu architects of that day did not know how to turn an arch but they had a device of their own scarcely less skilful, applied equally to the lofty towers of temples and to the humblest gate-way. It is what may be called the inverted stair"; each stone lay projecting out from that below. Thus was the Mahānadi bridge built by skilful engineers of the Hindus of the 10th and 11th century A. D.