Page:The Burton Holmes lectures; (IA burtonholmeslect04holm).pdf/119

 ABOVE THE FALLS

and climbing to the city by another path; and to our aversion dismay is added when we discover that the little planks that spanned the stream have yielded to the flood and left the waters bridgeless. How to regain the city without retracing our steps is a problem difficult to solve. I should be only too happy to record here some heroic Leander-like proceeding, but we dared not swim the rapid stream. If we imitated any classic character, it must have been poor old Anchises who was carried out of Troy by young Æneas, but that in our case an Arab Anchises carried the American Æneas upon his shoulders. Though far from deep the stream was very turbulent, and its rapidity and force and the proximity of sheer cascades not many yards below made the moments spent on that old believer's back moments of intense anxiety. And as if he knew my fears, this dilapidated old human ferry-boat seemed purposely to prolong the agony, slowly stumbling along, slipping at every step, and emitting with every breath a hoarse, deep gasp suggesting that he was about to die of heart-disease. If my decrepit bearer had grown weary and dropped me in the flood, I should have been swept by the swift Roummel down