24O EGYPT AND THE SOUDAN.

In a moment the Bashi-Bazouks were urging a portion of the crowd — the swimmers — down to the water's edge, where each man, after a moment's pause to deftly bind his garment round his head and to inflate the water skin which is the travelling carriage of every Nubian dweller on the Nile, committed himself to the stream and paddled over to the island. In a few moments the surface of the river was dotted with innumerable little bobbing figures, some being borne down stream at tremendous pace by a race more than usually swift, some stationary in a stretch of back-water, some spinning top-like round and round in an eddy from which it was not easy to escape, and all laughing and shouting or cocying to each other with a peculiar and not unmusical double note, by which these river dwellers convey their voices to a great distance above the rush of the water and the roar of the stream."

The temporary but awkward accident which prevented the steamer from achieving the passage triumphantly instead of clumsily, was said to have been caused by the necessity for using grass ropes instead of hempen cables. The swiftness of the water, the distances over which the hawsers had to be carried to the different rocks and islands where the hauling parties could gain foothold made it important, if not absolutely essential, to use a rope that would float and not be a dead weight against the tremendous current. But the grass ropes were weak, the strain was great, and we have already referred to the consequences. Two five-and-ahalf-inch hawsers parted just as the steamer had reached the top of the second " gate," whence she swung in against the shore. There were four more of these gates to pass, and the Great Gate, which was the most difficult, and the Nile began to fall; but Sir Evelyn Wood and Commander Ham mill, after tackling Sheikh Coco, the navigator, who had come from Dongola to pilot the steamer over the rapids, determined with the permission of the admiralty, to try a channel which they had previously explored, and the passage was made after eight hours' hard work, with more parting of hawsers, and fresh cables taken out by a boat from the island.

After being tracked through many difficult channels, and with the loss of three men, drowned by the carelessness and idleness of the