240 THE DOWNFALL OF THE DERVISHES body on board the gunboat shouted “Sit down,” “Keep still” ; and it was very fine to see how the soldiers immediately obeyed their officers, though for the moment they fully expected to be capsized into the flooded stream. By good luck the detached barge righted itself and remained fixed in midstream, about thirty yards from the gunboat and the other barge.

Nobody quite knew where we were or what had happened, but as it seemed certain that we were not likely to go much further that night, we all made preparations for going to sleep. The upper deck was quite a small affair, and the space at our disposal was curtailed by the presence of a large table and a number of camp chairs. Over these few square yards of deck we had to dispose the recumbent forms of some twenty-six human beings. The result was a sort of Chinese puzzle. I had always heard that Nature, when she had any close packing to do, employed the beautiful simplicity of the hexagon, and suggested a trial of this system; but the theory, owing, probably, to dissimilarities in our lengths and breadths, would not work at all. We lay