The four Englishmen were sitting up to their necks in water, two good leagues below the point where they first plunged, when the sound of approaching voices again sent them diving after the manner of otters surprised by the throng of hounds and spearmen. As they rose to the upper air, they were greeted with a shout of, "Sahib! Sahib! Why keep away? We are friends." The new-comers, however, were so formidable in aspect and equipment that Thomson refused to come to land until, after a short parley, they volunteered to throw their weapons into the river as a proof of their sincerity. Their assurances of amity afforded our countrymen a passable excuse for giving in, without inspiring any great amount of confidence. At the very worst, a blow on the head or a thrust in the chest killed more expeditiously than drowning or inanition. It was better to die and have done with it, than to endure all the torment of death without the repose, as of late had seemed to be their apportioned lot. And so they turned, and swam in, and were helped ashore naked as Ulysses when he was washed up on the Phæacian coast after his wrestle with the Adriatic surf. Like him, their knees and wrists gave away beneath them: for their vigour was subdued by long toil among the billows: and their bodies were livid and swollen; and much water oozed from mouth and nostril; and they lay without breath, and speech, and well nigh without life, stricken by an exceeding weariness. They had between them a flannel shirt, a strip of linen cloth, and five severe wounds. Exposure to the heat had puffed the skin of their shoulders with huge blisters, as if their clothes had been burned off their backs by fire. But they found an Alcinöus in the person of Dirigbijah Singh, a loyal gentleman of Oude; the landlord of that district, and the chieftain to whom their captors owed feudal allegiance. Good-natured as they proved to be, these fellows could not resist the temptation of plundering the Englishmen who had been so unaccountably delivered into their hands. They abstracted a cap-pouchful of rupees which poor Murphy had tied under his right knee, the nominal price, it may be, of some buckets drawn at a risk which could not be valued in money. After lying for a while wrapped in blankets, the refugees recovered strength sufficient to allow of their being supported to the nearest village, over a distance which appeared to them more miles than it was furlongs in reality. They were taken to the hut of the headman, who received them kindly, and set before them lentil porridge, wheat cakes, and preserves, of which they eat like men who had fed little and badly during a month past, and for seventy hours had not fed at all.