RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
question is: "How else could we have accomplished what we did?" For which there is no satisfactory answer. I have ridden over it since it was completed and, in common with a majority of those who have enjoyed this privilege, I am strongly prejudiced in its favour. There are few, if any roads in the world more spectacular, or which represent a greater triumph of engineering skill. Fairly hewn out of the almost solid, hut too crumbling, walls of the Bued River Canyon, it winds for about seventeen miles through constantly changing scenes of extraordinary grandeur, then it strikes the foothills of the mountains and rises in a succession of splendid upward sweeps to an altitude of more than five thousand feet in less than six miles.
The Benguet Road was originally a railway project and was to have been built by the British company which owns the Manila and Dagupan Railway. But this syndicate wanted a perpetual grant and a guarantee from the government which could not then be given. It was necessary, in any case, to build a wagon-road before railway construction could be started and Captain Mead, who was sent out at the head of a surveying party, reported that such a road would cost at least $50,000, or $75,000. The Commission appropriated the $50,000 and issued orders to have the work begun, fully expecting to have to add another $25,000 before the road was finished. Nobody knows what character of road Captain Mead had in mind when he made his estimate, but it transpired that nothing short of first-class construction would last through even one heavy rain. Besides, the Bued River Canyon had to be spanned six or eight times with tremendous suspension bridges, and before the project was completed an unwilling government had spent something like $2,500,000 on it. This was spread over a period of years, of course, and much of it went for necessary improvements or for the replacement of storm-wrecked bridges and
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