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 the lifeboat, and I saw that even the commodore’s cold and self-satisfied dignity was disturbed.  The hawsers strain again.  Creak, crack! creak, crack!  The lifeboat watches and comes nearer to us.  There is a mighty yell.  We cannot go!  Yes, we can!  There is a mighty pull, and you feel the boat almost torn asunder.  Another mighty pull, a tremendous quiver of the timbers, and you turn to see the angry water, which sounds as if a hundred hounds are beating under us for entry at the barred door.  There is another deafening yell, the men tear away like frightened horses.  Another mighty pull, and another, and another, and we slide over into smooth water.

Then I breathe freely, and yell myself.

The little boat seems to gasp for breath as a drowning man, saved in the nick of time, shudders in every limb with pain and fear.

As we tied up in smooth water, all the men, from the laoban to the meanest tracker, laughed and yelled and told each other how it was done.  We baled the water out of the boat, and one was glad to pull away from the deafening hum of the thundering cataract.  A faulty tow-line, a slippery hitch, one false step, one false maneuver, and the shore might have been by that time strewn with our corpses.  As it was, we were safe and happy.

But the trackers are strange creatures.  At times they are a quarter of a mile ahead.  Soft echoes of their coarse chanting came down the confines of the gully, after the rapid had been passed, and in rounding a rocky promontory mid-stream, one would catch sight of them bending their bodies in pulling steadily against the current of the river.  Occasionally one of these poor fellows slips; there is a shriek, his body is dashed unmercifully against the jagged cliffs in its last journey to the river, which carries the multilated corpse away.  And yet these men, engaged in this terrific toil, with utmost danger to their lives, live almost exclusively on boiled rice and dirty cabbage, and receive the merest pittance in money at the journey’s end.