"OVER THEY WENT, THE WHOLE BLACK LINE OF THEM."
There stood five hundred Dongolese ready to haul, and there was the whole floating population—pilots, soldiers, and camp-followers—gathered on the banks to wonder and to criticize the job which nobody understood but half a dozen straight little men in white helmets, who stood about on rocks and snapped things out in English that were straightway yelled down the lines in vigorous Dongolese. It was Trigonometry speaking, and the law of component forces, and "Confound those niggers! Tell 'em to slack away on that starboard hawser. Tell 'em to slack away!"
It was respectfully presented to Mathematics, Esq., that the "niggers" in question couldn't slack away any more without letting the hawser go or tumbling into the rapids, for they were on one of the little islands, on the brink of it, holding the steamer back while the land-lines hauled against them.
HOW THE ENGINEERS WERE CARRIED OVER TO THE NILE ISLANDS.
"Then in they go," ordered Trigonometry. "Tell 'em to get over to that next island. Tell 'em to get over quick!"
And over they went, the whole black line of them, right through the rapids, swimming and struggling in the buffeting surge, getting across somehow, hawser and all, where white men must have perished. And the steamboat had gained a hundred feet.
Then one of the front lines of haulers in turn had to move forward to an island, to swim for it with six hundred feet of hawser slapping the river as they dragged it. What a picture here as these naked men leaped in, fearless, each with a flashing bayonet thrust in his thick white turban! Mathematics, Esq., had no notion of trying this sort of thing when he changed islands, vastly preferring his pulley-blocks, and would presently be hauled across on a rope trolley, as passengers are swung ashore from wrecks by the life-saving men. That made a picture, too!
Thus, slowly and with infinite pains, they worked the patient steamboat, length by length, island by island, torrent by torrent, up through the Great Gate (Bab-el-Kebir), up to the very head waters of the second cataract; and there, with victory in their grasp, saw the forward hawser snap suddenly with the noise of a gun, and the old side-wheeler swing out helpless into the main rush of the river, swing clean around as the side-lines held, and then start down. Whereupon it was: "Cut hawsers, everybody!" and drop these pulley-blocks and tackle-fixings, useless now, and let her go, let her go, since there is no stopping her, and Heaven help the boys on board! Then, amid shouts of dismay, the big boat Nassif-Kheir plunged forward to her destruction, while the mathematical gentlemen stared in horror—then stared in amazement. For look! She keeps to the channel! She is running true! Wonder of wonders, she is shooting the rapids, shooting the greatest cataract of the Nile, where boats of her tonnage never passed before!
The Nassif-Kheir was saved, and every man aboard her, and every box of stores. She was saved by an humble Canadian pilot, who had never studied trigonometry, but who stepped to the wheel when he saw the peril, and steered her down those furious rapids as he had steered other boats down other rapids on the old St. Lawrence. After that, when the expedition found itself in trouble in the upper cataracts, say those of Tangoor or Akashe or Ambigole or Dal, and when the Royal Engineers had drawn up some neat plan with compasses and squares for doing a certain thing with a boat, and had proved by the books that it could be done, and agreed that it should be done forthwith, then some one would usually say, just at the last, as by an afterthought: