Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/414

 and fully conscious of my own supreme well-being. How fair was my lot, I thought, compared with that of the average young civil servant who rarely got much beyond a pile of dusty files on an over- loaded office table.

The stream ran rapidly with a merry purring sound and the rafts, kept end on to the current by polers at bow and stern, slid forward at an even pace. Suddenly we whisked round a sharp bend, and be- fore we knew what awaited us we were caught in the jaws of a formidable rapid. I was aware of a waste of angry water, white with foam, stretching away in front of us; of a host of rugged granite blocks. black with spray, poking their sharp noses out of the river, which boiled and leaped around them; of an instant acceleration of pace, and then I found my self standing in the bows of the raft, punting pole in hand, helping ny forward boatman to fight the evil- tempered thing which a moment earlier had been the placid, smiling river. We were travelling at a headlong pace now and the raft reeled and wallowed and canted with such violence that, even bareshod as we were, it was no easy matter to keep our footing on the slippery, rounded surfaces of the bamboos. Of the length, extent and difficulties of the rapid into which we had been so suddenly tossed we, of course. knew nothing. Of prospective dangers, however, we had no leisure to think, for we were wholly preoccupied by those which we were already beset, and every instant decisive action had to be taken to meet crowding emergencies, grasped, mel