CHAPTER IX.
DINNER AT THE GENERAL’S.As usual after the cool weather had begun, the river was beginning to go down, and it was no easy matter for the Nebula to pick her way up-stream. As her captain said pathetically, “If the sandbanks would only stay where they were, you’d know where you were. But when a great beast of a shoal was in one place when you went down the river, and on the return voyage you found it somewhere else quite different, where were you?” A further handicap was imposed by the necessity of towing two or three large flat-bottomed boats—carrying the fortunes of the Eurasian and native clerks, peons and other underlings, whom Sir Harry had selected for Sahar from the derelict staff of the Qadirabad Agency,—since these displayed a positive genius in fouling the bank, the sh
