The record of the forty days spent by the battalion between Sarras and Korti is one of unceasing toil. The Royal Irish worked like galley slaves. From dawn to dark, in burning and daily increasing heat, they rowed, and poled, and hauled the boats by ropes through the easier portions of the rapids. In the more difficult places it became necessary to lighten the whalers, and the crews had to unload them partially or entirely and to transport the cargo across the rocks, work the boats through the broken water, and then carefully repack them, with the knowledge, acquired by bitter experience, that an hour or two later the performance would have to be repeated. Occasionally, to avoid some especially bad piece of river, the boats had to be emptied, lifted out of the water, and hauled across country on the rollers provided for the purpose. Sometimes a boat missed the narrow passage among the rocks which barred her way, and was whirled backwards down the current until the men on the banks, hanging on to the drag ropes with their arms almost wrenched from the sockets, succeeded in hauling her into slack water. Occasionally a whaler was wrecked; nearly every day and sometimes several times in the day one or more were injured by striking against submerged rocks, and in default of professional boat-builders the officers had to repair the damage themselves. Major-General (then Captain) Burton Forster’s diary contains many references to his labours as a shipwright, and a few are quoted almost at random, to show what “handy men” the officers of the XVIIIth became in the expedition of 1884-85. “Found Sergeant Evans’s boat again broken at a small rapid. Stopped, and put in a plank about nine feet long, as the original one was cracked all that distance.” ... “Got all the ten boats of my Company up rapids by dark and beached them for repairs.” ... “Four-fifths of the keel torn off Corporal ----’s boat, mended her.” The work went on for seven days a-week; there was no rest on Sundays, or even on Christmas day, the entry for which runs--“Divine service for Roman Catholics, then drew boats up main rapids, kept moving, and unloaded in the evening.” In less arduous circumstances the voyage up the Nile would have proved a pleasant experience, for the scenery possesses a weird beauty of its own, wholly unlike that of any other part of the world; the climate is glorious, and the endless series of ruins which line the banks interesting in the extreme. But the officers of the Royal Irish had no time to admire scenery, or to study the archæology of the ancient Egyptians. They had suddenly been turned into fresh-water sailors; they had become jacks-of-all-trades--shipwrights, doctors, dock labourers; they had to maintain discipline, to keep up _morale_, and to cheer the men when under the strain of unceasing toil even their buoyant spirits for a moment flagged. An officer of the regiment thus records his reminiscences of the boat work on the Nile--