The great boom across the river to catch
the floating logs had been carried away in the flood, and merely showed a
few melancholy and ineffectual spikes of wood sticking up above the now
calm and sluggish river.
We towed up easily enough, through a quiet and peaceful country, which
only became gorgeous under the alchemy of sunset, reaching Nopura in good
time to tie up before dinner.
_Friday, September 29_.--On Thursday morning we started, as usual, at dawn,
and proceeded to pole and haul our way up the devious channel of the Pohru.
Some four or five miles we accomplished successfully, although there were
ominous signs of a gradual lack of water, until we came upon a hopeless
shallow, where the river, instead of concentrating its energies on one
deep and narrow channel, had run to waste over a wide bed, where the
wrinkling wavelets showed the golden brown of the gravel just below the
surface. Our big dounga stuck hard and fast at once, and Captain Jurna
promptly gave up all hope of getting farther. He was, in fact, greatly
gratified to find his prophesies come true, and an insufferable air of "I
told you so" overspread his face as he wagged his head with mock sorrow,
and gently poked the bottom with his pole to show how firmly fixed we were.
Having an invalid with us, however, it was important to gain every easy
mile we could, and it was not until all the fleet in turn had attempted to
cross the shallow, and failed, that we made up our minds to take to our
land transport.
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