CHAP. xi. Fun in a Coracle. 155 



the boat, which would otherwise have been carried away down the 

 rapid ; and standing up to the fork in rather rapid water. So with a 

 lengthened " You indeed ! " of astonishment, he simply said to the 

 boy, " Hold the boat while I free the line." The grandiloquent youth 

 woke up to the realities of life, and dashed off to release the line 

 himself, and both of them got into the boat again and proceeded. 

 Then R.'s pent-up sense of the ludicrous could be restrained no longer, 

 and ring after ring of laughter would come out, though the poor boy 

 was sadly silent, and after R. had told the tale to every one, and fairly 

 used it up, he was heard gurgling alone in his tent, as he was washing 

 hands, etc., for dinner. " What's the matter ? " shouted H. R. replied 

 solemnly, " My Lord, if I had not caught you, you would have been 

 gone." 



This idea of helplessness in the white man, involving protective aid 

 in the black, seems strangely to have pervaded all the boatmen, all 

 looking upon us as " landlubbers " perhaps, for the very next day came 

 P.'s turn for a pip, and this time in deep water. In the heavy water of 

 a big pool the boat gave a sudden whisk which upset P.'s centre of 

 gravity, and over he went. In consequence up tipped the light coracle, 

 out went the boatman at the opposite side, and both men and boat 

 went down, sucked under the rock by the current, "rari nantes in 

 gurgite vasto" twenty feet deep. P. struck out for the top, but only to 

 come against the bottom of the boat ; at length swimming free of it, 

 and emerging, and still swimming in twenty feet of water with a heavy 

 current, a new peril awaited him. The boatman seized him by the 

 arm to save him, which of course hindered his swimming, and it took 

 all P. knew in shouting Tamil, and striking out, to shake him off. 

 Meanwhile, P.'s pith hat had floated down into the pool below, where 

 R. was, and recognized it as his son's. While R. was making for it in 

 his coracle a black figure appeared on the top of the high rocks above, 

 gesticulating and pointing to the hat, from which R. gathered that P. 

 had taken care of himself, and was now only in danger of sunstroke 

 from being hatless. The gesticulating figure was the boatman, who 

 coming down for the hat, was full of his woes. The boat had upset, 

 and he and the gentleman had gone down, and the boat was gone. 

 "But the gentleman?" asked R.'s boatman. "He exists," said P.'s 

 boatman, "but the boat," and that was the important point to him, 

 " the boat has disappeared." An hour or so afterwards a good diver 



