Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/176

158 you are landed at a rocky point on the left bank of the river, and find yourself unexpectedly—or what would be unexpectedly were it not for the marplots aforesaid—in presence of the singular aquatic industry of which I have spoken.

At your feet some couple of fathoms below you races the First Cataract, no genuine "waterfall" even here at its point of greatest force and volume, but only a pretty swift, tolerably deep, and very moderately steep rapid. Here, where it is at its steepest, the river twists round a sharpish corner, and descends to a level some thirty or forty feet lower by a gradient of, say, fifty or sixty yards in length. This incline of one in five or so can hardly be considered very abrupt for a river, whatever it might be for a road; and, indeed, the so-called cataract is merely a brisk and lively, but in no sense a formidable, or even an imposing, water-race. "At this rate," it was remarked, "we have rivers in Scotland which are pretty nearly all cataract"; and you