A swift broad river, with the water broken into foaming wavelets by rocks which were everywhere showing their vicious heads above the surface; a string of nuggars, or half-decked boats, fifteen feet broad, forty-five feet long, flat-bottomed, each with a thick rope attached to the bows, and a string of men on the bank towing it under a hot sun.
Perhaps you have yourself towed a skiff on the Thames, when the current was so strong that the progress made with the oars was unsatisfactory. Well, if you have, you don’t know one bit what this was like. In the first place, the Thames, even by Monkey Island, is still water compared to the Nile between Surras and Dal, a sixty-mile stretch. Then your skiff did not carry six tons of beef, bacon, biscuit, and other stores. It may also be safely asserted that the towing-path you walked on was not composed of sharp pointed rocks.
Those were the conditions under which certain picked British soldiers, one of whom was an old friend of ours, lost sight of for a considerable time, were dragging their nuggar up a series of cataracts. Towing always looks to me an absurd business, much as if a man were to carry a horse about, and call it going for a ride.
“Are you growling or singing, Tarrant?” asked Kavanagh of the man behind him on the string.
“Not singing, you may take your davy,” growled the man addressed.
“I fancied not, though there is a certain likeness in your way of doing both which made me ask. I suppose you are growling then—what about?”
“What about, indeed!” grunted Tarrant. “D’ye suppose I ’listed as a soldier or a barge horse?”
“Don’t know; never saw your attestation papers.”
“Why, it was as a soldier then. I should have thought twice if I had known I was to be put to this sort of work.”
“Really! Why, when we were rowing, you did not like that, and said you would sooner be doing any work on your legs.”