There was a perceptible sway of heads forwards, which started at the back and ran from line to line towards the platform like a quick ripple across a smooth sea.

It was as though this crowded pack of men and women was drawn to move towards the speaker, where indeed there was no room at all to move.
And in truth the subject was one to stir the blood.

Drake prefaced his account by a description of the geography of Boruwimi; he instanced briefly the iniquities of the Arab slave-dealers whom he was attacking.
Thereupon he contrasted the numbers of his little force with the horde of his enemies, and dwelt for a second upon their skill as marksmen; so that his auditors, following him as he hewed his path through the tangle of an untrodden forest, felt that each obstacle he stopped at might mean not merely failure to the expedition, but death to all who shared in it.
Success and life were one and the same thing, and the condition of that thing was speed.

He must fall upon the Arabs unawares, like a bolt from the blue.

They forgot that he who led that expedition was speaking to them now; they were with him in the obscure depths of the undergrowth, surging against gigantic barriers of fallen tree-trunks, twenty, thirty feet high; they were marching behind him, like him at grips with nature in a six-weeks' struggle of life and death; and when finally he burst into the clearing on the river's bank the ripple went backwards across the hall, and a cheer of relief rang out, as though their lives, too, were saved.
Upon Fielding the relation produced a somewhat peculiar effect.