The bottom of the river was full of rocks the size of twenty-four-pound cannon balls which were covered with a thin slime of green weed. The water was absolutely clear. It frothed and bubbled about our calves. Fifty yards below the place where we had gone aground, the shallows terminated in a waterfall down which the river cascaded. We began to dig a passage towards it with our hands, lifting the great slimy stones and plonking them down on either side of the boat. Under them were more stones of equal size and even greater slipperiness.
It is difficult to describe the emotions that one feels when one is aground on a twelve-hundred-mile boat journey within hailing distance of one’s point of departure. It is an experience that has fallen to the lot of some blue-water sailors who have grounded when setting off to sail round the world. But about them there was something of tragedy which derived from the grandeur of the design. To be stranded in a river sixteen inches deep is simply ludicrous.
At the head of the fall to which we finally succeeded in dragging the boat, it became stuck with its forepart hanging over the drop. It would go neither backwards nor forwards, but suddenly as we redoubled our efforts it overbalanced and began to go downhill at a tremendous rate with everyone sprawling over the gunwales, vainly trying to get aboard.
The only one who succeeded was Karam Chand, the chief boatman, the young man who had been lent to us by the Executive Engineer, to ensure that he got his boat back in one piece – at this moment it seemed a faint hope. Fortunately he managed to take the tiller, otherwise it would have broached-to and probably capsized. The rest of us were half in and half out of the boat.
It was like descending an escalator on one’s back. The noise made by the boat as it bounced from boulder to boulder was terrifying. Finally it plopped into a deep pool, watched by a little band of country people who stood high above us on a concrete spur, part of the out-works of the canal.
It was a lovely day. Overhead, infinitely remote in a pale blue sky, streamers of cirrus were being blown to tatters in a wind that was coming off the deserts of Central Asia. On the left, a small solitary white temple winked in the sunlight. Below it there were terraces and silvery-looking cliffs of sandstone and at the foot of them where the jungle broke in a green sea the light shimmered and danced in a haze of heat. On the river itself the wind tore at the surface of the water, throwing up little arcs of spray which formed rainbows against the sun. There was the pleasing sound of rushing water as the Ganges poured down eagerly over the stones in innumerable small rivulets on its journey towards the Bay of Bengal. It was travelling much faster than we were. It had taken us three-quarters of an hour to cover three hundred yards.
In the next hour we covered eight hundred yards. The pool in which the boat floated, apparently undamaged, opened out and seemed to give promise of becoming a navigable reach. Ahead of us a man came down to the shore from the jungle, picking his way delicately among the stones. He wore a long-sleeved white shirt and its whiteness gave him the appearance of being disembodied. Only his dark head and spindly limbs showed. On his back he carried a raft made from orange-coloured gourds. He placed it in the river, spread-eagled himself on top of it and began to paddle some distance downstream and set off towards the right bank which was invisible from where we were deep in the bed of the river. The sight of this man gave us hopes that we might be coming to deep water, but they were vain ones. Soon the grumbling, bumping noises began again and once more we were aground and over the side, pushing the boat, slithering from rock to rock, watched by cows which stood at the water’s edge, sticking out their thick, pink tongues at us and lowing derisively.
We excavated another channel, a hundred yards long, and another of fifty; both were followed by rapids. By now there was a lot of water in the bottom of the boat but there was so much gear on board that it was impossible to tell whether the hull was holed or not. To the right a mile or so away, the spires of the Temple of Daksheshwara, the scene of Siva’s godly brawl in the suburbs of Hardwar, rose against the evening sun, mocking us with their nearness. It was four o’clock.
The next hour was a duplication of what had gone before, except that the rocks on which we slipped and slithered grew larger and more difficult to lift and more painful to stand on. At five we rumbled down into a deliciously calm stretch of water in which the stream ran sluggishly. Here a bridge was being built, a twin of the one upstream. A country boat was crossing piled high with shisham wood from the jungle, and on top of it were perched the woodcutters themselves, bundles of off-white rags, more like scarecrows than human beings. This was the Shishamwallah9 ferry. This reach was succeeded by a brutal stretch of shoal water in which the stones stuck up like fangs and which ended in a waterfall over which the boat hung, immovable, threatening to break in two. By the time we had negotiated this obstacle the sun was setting and it was time to make camp. I was in favour of stopping, as one place seemed as good as another, but an insane urge to press on seized the rest of the party. ‘If we are to reach the Balawali Bridge in two days it is necessary to go on,’ G. said, and when Karam Chand added his voice it was useless to argue. Perhaps they were goaded by the sight of the Temple of Daksheshwara which, by some cruel twist of the river, seemed far closer than it had an hour and a half previously.
The sky was now a brilliant saffron. On the stony shore, trees that had been brought down by the river in flood and stripped of their bark on the way, gleamed in the last of the light which was draining away rapidly. Myriads of winged insects swarmed about the boat, attracted by the light of the torches that were being wielded improvidently as we flashed them into the water searching for a navigable channel. As instruments of navigation our eyes were now useless to us; the water reflected the last light in the sky and its depth could only be determined with the aid of torches and poles or simply by getting out and standing in it.
Now the boat became immovably stuck. It was as if it were glued to the bottom. With infinite difficulty, swearing in a variety of languages, we unloaded the luggage piece by piece: the huge tin trunks, the great bouncy bedding rolls, the stove and the cans of kerosene, together with the boatmen’s modest gear, and started to drag the boat to the head of the next fall, leaving Wanda to guard the luggage alone on the foreshore, with only a torch to defend herself from the beasts of the jungle which here loomed above her like the Wild Wood.
The rapid was more than four hundred yards long, and the last we saw of her as we shot downhill was a despairing figure dressed in a jungle hat, a leaving present from a Major-General in Delhi, and a bathing costume, scrabbling for warm clothes in one of the tin trunks, haloed by a swarm of insects that had been attracted to her by the light of the torch.
There was a further interminably long delay while we returned upstream on foot to make a portage of the luggage. While we were lugging the trunks over the stones I wondered how much more of this treatment the boat could stand without being irreparably damaged. The thought of being marooned here, almost within sight of the place from which we had set off, with a piece of Indian Government property with its bottom torn out, which had been lent to us under duress, was more than I could bear to contemplate.
It was now quite dark and very cold. Shivering, we poled across to the right side of the stream, for we were all unanimous about not wanting to sleep on the edge of the jungle, and edged the boat in as close as possible to the shore. The water was so shallow that there was still a gap of several yards between the boat and the beach when it finally grounded and the unloading of the gear we needed for the night was a miserable, cold business. By good fortune there were two small patches of sand among the stones and on these we made our camp. The boatmen disappeared, in order, so they said, to look for firewood. I would not have been surprised if they had not returned. But they did, dragging with them one of the barkless trees. Soon a big fire was going and we made strong, sweet tea for everyone.
Now Wanda began to cook rice, watched by the boatmen who squatted round the fire smoking the vile cigarettes called bidis and sipping tea from a pannikin. They seemed to be in no hurry to prepare their evening meal.
Finally, embarrassed by their unblinking gaze, she asked G. when they were proposing to start cooking.
‘They