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
against the leaping current in the gapway in the reef.

None come to offer assistance to our crowd, who are now turned facing
us, and strain almost flat on their backs, giving the strength of every
drop of blood and fibre of their being; and the scene, now lit up by a
momentary glimmer of feeble sunlight, assumes a wonderful and terrible
picturesqueness. I am chained to the spot by a horrible fascination, and
I find myself unconsciously saying, "I fear she will not go. I fear--"
But a man has fallen exhausted, he almost fell overboard, and now leans
against the mast in utter weariness and fatigue, brought on by the
morning's exertions. He is instantly relieved by a bull-dog fellow of
enormous strength. Now comes the culminating point, a truly terrifying
moment, the very anguish of which frightened me, as I looked around for