from her bow and two
checking her swing on either quarter, and her own steam helping her.

There stood five hundred Dongolese ready to haul, and there was the
whole floating population--pilots, soldiers, and camp-followers--gathered
on the banks to wonder and to criticize the job which nobody understood
but half a dozen straight little men in white helmets, who stood about
on rocks and snapped things out in English that were straightway yelled
down the lines in vigorous Dongolese. It was Trigonometry speaking, and
the law of component forces, and "Confound those niggers! Tell 'em to
slack away on that starboard hawser. Tell 'em to _slack away_!"

[Illustration: "OVER THEY WENT, THE WHOLE BLACK LINE OF THEM."]

It was respectfully presented to Mathematics, Esq., that the "niggers"
in question couldn't slack away any more without letting the hawser go
or tumbling into the rapids, for they were on one of the little islands,
on the brink of it, holding the steamer back while the land-lines hauled
against them.

[Illustration: HOW THE ENGINEERS WERE CARRIED OVER TO THE NILE ISLANDS.]

"Then in they go," ordered Trigonometry. "Tell 'em to get over to that
next island. Tell 'em to get over _quick_!"

And over they went, the whole black line of them, right through the
rapids, swimming and struggling in the buffeting surge, getting across
somehow, hawser and all, where white men must have perished. And the
steamboat had gained a hundred feet.

Then one of the front lines of haulers in turn had to move forward to an
island, to swim for it with six hundred feet of hawser slapping the
river as they dragged it. What a picture here as these naked men leaped
in, fearless, each with a flashing bayonet thrust in his thick white
turban! Mathematics, Esq., had no notion of trying this sort of thing
when _he_ changed islands, vastly preferring his pulley-blocks, and
would presently be hauled across on a rope trolley, as passengers are
swung ashore from wrecks by the life-saving men. That made a picture,
too!

Thus, slowly and with infinite pains, they worked the patient steamboat,
length by length, island by island, torrent by torrent, up through the
Great Gate (Bab-el-Kebir), up to the very head waters of the second
cataract; and there, with victory in their grasp, saw the forward hawser
snap suddenly with the noise of a gun, and the old side-wheeler swing
out helpless into the main rush of the river, swing clean around as the
si