Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/125

Rh pretty problem; but the pace is too good for the most expert mathematician to have tackled it. Before he could have said "x," the gallant little animal got its head past the post, at the very moment when the last toe of the tottering Arab reluctantly loosed hold of its "back hair;" and rider and stakes were at the same moment successfully landed.

The next event, the buffalo-race, might be simply disposed of by saying that it was won by a man seated astride of a buffalo. Such a description of the winner would not lead to any confusion, for there was no other competitor who answered to it at the finish. Nevertheless this contest would have had its interest for a zoologist; and, indeed, like the last, for a mathematician also, if only as showing the number of combinations, other than the ordinary equestrian one, which may be formed out of a man and a buffalo as the result of a buffalo-race. In the first place—and this, it must be admitted, was the most frequent combination, if such it