Slowly Down the Ganges. Eric Newby

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СКАЧАТЬ sunset in the National Geographic Magazine. It was very calm and very impressive, but when we asked the raftsmen how far it was to Nagal – ‘Wuh kitni dur hai?’ – they said it was ‘Bahut dur’ (very far), and wrapped themselves closer still in their wet rags. These men were remarkably vague about their whereabouts. All they seemed to know was that their village was somewhere near Nagal, a small market town of 2,000 inhabitants, which lay somewhere to the east of the Ganges.

      Now we went aground in the last of the light. Nine men and one woman hopelessly lost in a maze of shoals; blundering about in the darkness probing for a channel with bamboo poles; at one moment up to our waists in water, the next with it barely covering our calves. When eventually we did find a way it led through quicksands in which it was impossible to let go of the side of the boat for an instant for fear of disappearing for ever; attempting to move the boat in these circumstances, with no solid substance underfoot, was rather like pedalling a unicycle in a circus.

      As we went slowly on, Karam Chand interrogated the raftsmen about the whereabouts of their village. ‘Three miles,’ they said at first, and then much later, ‘Two miles’, from which distance, however far we travelled, they refused to be dislodged. Finally, even Karam Chand became exasperated. ‘It is my opinion,’ he said, ‘that their village is nowhere near Nagal at all.’

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