ompelled to unload hastily; and a regimental
carpenter was swearing aloud as he tried, on a wholly insufficient
allowance of white lead, to plaster up the sun-parched gaping seams of
the boat herself.

'First the bloomin' rudder snaps,' said he to the world in general;
'then the mast goes; an' then, s' 'help me, when she can't do nothin'
else, she opens 'erself out like a cock-eyes Chinese lotus.'

'Exactly the case with my breeches, whoever you are,' said the tailor,
without looking up. 'Dick, I wonder when I shall see a decent shop
again.'

There was no answer, save the incessant angry murmur of the Nile as it
raced round a basalt-walled bend and foamed across a rock-ridge half
a mile upstream. It was as though the brown weight of the river would
drive the white men back to their own country. The indescribable scent
of Nile mud in the air told that the stream was falling and the next
few miles would be no light thing for the whale-boats to overpass. The
desert ran down almost to the banks, where, among gray, red, and black
hillocks, a camel-corps was encamped. No man dared even for a day lose
touch of the slow-moving boats; there had been no fighting for weeks
past, and throughout all that time the Nile had never spared them. Rapid
had followed rapid, rock rock, and island-group island-group, till the
rank and file had long since lost all count of direction and very
nearly of time. They were moving somewhere, they did not know why, to do
something, they did not know what. Before them lay the Nile, and at the
other end of it was one Gordon, fighting for the dear life, in a town
called Khartoum. There were columns of British troops in the desert,
or in one of the many deserts; there were yet more columns waiting to
embark on the river; there were fresh drafts waiting at Assioot and
Assuan; there were lies and rumours running over the face of the
hopeless land from Suakin to the Sixth Cataract, and men supposed
generally that there must be some one in authority to direct the general
scheme of the many movements. The duty of that particular river-column
was to keep the whale-boats afloat in the water, to avoid trampling
on the villagers' crops when the gangs 'tracked' the boats with lines
thrown from midstream, to get as much sleep and food as was possible,
and, above all, to press on without delay in the teeth of the churning
Nile.

With the soldiers sweated and toiled the correspondents of the
newspapers, and they