Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/750



Taking our turn between his rapid flights, we darted through another door into a thick steam, in which black shadows danced and trampled in great vats of dough, while farther on three men by the light of a petroleum flare were shaping the dough into small round loaves. On once more to the two ovens, where brown bronze devils raked blazing fagots with their bare hands to the chant of an infinitely old droning crone in the corner. At every stage of the work some member of the crew squatted huddled on his haunches, keeping count of progress made by dropping pebbles into an earthenware pot, and paying each worker in kind,—to the measurers grain, to the kneaders dough, and to the oven-men a percentage of the crisp, brown, freshly baked loaves.

We were away early next morning, and at Keneh had overtaken our competitors, and the three dahabeahs were together again. Three great pyramids of canvas, one hundred and twenty feet from deck to truck, rushed in close order round wide curves, brushed across shallows where touching the bottom would mean dismasting, past a laboring upbound post-boat as if she were anchored, and faster and faster under the rising gale the three over-canvassed boats surged south. Suddenly ahead appeared the crucial point in the shape of a reverse curve in the stream, which here bent sharply on itself, entailing a short reach almost in the wind's eye.

Our rivals were both flat-bottomed steel boats, with no grip on the water to prevent them from sliding sideways, while our good ship Tih, on the other hand, of greater depth and heavily over-sparred, was almost as handy as an American schooner. There was no taking in of sail,—there was no time for it,—and as the Herodotus crashed into the bank on one side, spilling her crew overboard to fight the wind and current with a tow-rope, the Maat dropped her men on the other, while through the passage between the Tih staggered. Our old reis, whose eighty-nine years had dropped from him at the same time as his turban, took the tiller. Every one braced himself for a capsize,—could he avoid it? The big yard—we knew there was a weak spot in it—writhed like a wounded thing, the water was already flowing over the lee side of the lower deck,—one more quivering