PASSAGE OF THE PIONEER BOATS. 253 In all these operations the British troops were aided, and exceedingly well aided too, by two thousand of the Egyptian soldiers of the army of Sir Evelyn Wood. These men were all stationed at various places south of Assouan, and everybody acknowledged that they did their duty.

The work of towing the boats was enormously heavy, and the whole voyage was so difficult and dangerous that the loss of a percentage of the boats was to be expected. The river banks were altogether unsuitable for towing. Heavy sand, interspersed with trees and rocks, is not easy to walk over under any circumstances; but when dragging a long rope — with a boat at the end of it — which catches in trees and has to be passed round projecting stones continually, the labour becomes severe in the extreme. A correspondent asking two or three voyageurs what they thought of the river as compared with Canadian streams, they explained that the cataracts on the latter are far more difficult and formidable than anything they had yet seen on the Nile. But then on the Ottawa " they guessed" that when they had passed a cataract they generally had a fairly long stretch of slack water; but here the rapids " seemed pretty thick, and came out one top of another a little too soon." When informed that sixty miles further on, the Batn-el-Hajar came to an end, and that they would have two or three hundred miles of comparatively slack water, they ejaculated, "Sixty miles! Then this business is a big job, and no mistake."

The passage of the first or pioneer boats, described by an eyewitness, gives a fair picture of the manner of the voyageurs. " The breeze comparatively was light, and for half an hour I watched ere the leading boat entered the lowermost point of the rapids; which she did in advance of the dahabeeah. The loft)* expanse of sail the latter exposed to the wind enabled her, however, to pass again the smaller boat, and slowly, but surely, she breasted the stream. and entering the quieter water above, went on her way but little delayed. In comparison with her the five whalers looked like cockle-shells floating on the current as they swayed across rapidly from eddy to eddy, or paused in mid-stream as the gusts of wind or water caught them. Although deeply laden and carrying nearly