w none else. And now, as I say, they
bellow like beasts, each man ravenously eager to be among the number
chosen to earn a few cash.[D] The arrangement at last is made, and the
discordant hubbub, instead of lessening, grows more and more deafening.
It is a miserable, desperate, wholly panic-stricken crowd that then
harnesses up with their great hooks joined to a rough waist-belt, with
which they connect themselves to the straining tow-lines.

And now her nose is put into the teeth of this trough of treachery--a
veritable boiling cauldron, stirring up all past mysteries. Waves rush
furiously towards us, with the growl of a thousand demons, whose anger
is only swelled by the thousands of miles of her course from far-away
Tibet. It seems as if they must instantly devour her, and that we must
now go under to swell the number of their victims. But they only beat
her back, for she rides gracefully, faltering timidly with frightened
creaks and groans, whilst the waters shiver her frail bulwarks with
their cruel message of destruction, which might mean her very
death-rattle. I get landed in the stomach with the end of a gigantic
bamboo boat-hook, used by one of the men standing in the bows whose duty
is to fend her off the rocks. He falls towards the river. I grab his
single garment, give one swift pull, and he comes up again with a jerky
little laugh and asks if he has hurt me--yelling through his hands in my
ears, for the noise is terrible. To look out over the side makes me
giddy, for the fifteen-knot current, blustering and bubbling and foaming
and leaping, gives one the feeling that he is in an express train
tearing through the sea. On shore, far ahead, I can see the
trackers--struggling forms of men and women, touching each other,
grasping each other, wrestling furiously and mightily, straining on all
fours, now gripping a boulder to aid them forward, now to the right, now
to the left, always fighting for one more inch, and engaged in a task
which to one seeing it for the first time looks as if it were quite
beyond human effort. Fagged and famished beings are these trackers,
whose life day after day, week in week out, is harder than that of the
average costermonger's donkey. They throw up their hands in a dumb
frenzy of protest and futile appeal to the presiding deity; and here on
the river, depending entirely upon those men on the shore, slowly, inch
by inch, the little craft, feeling her own weakness, forges ahead
again