All were filled as tightly as they could be crammed with troops.

They were packed as in slavers, squatting by the side of each other as closely as sardines in a box.

The seven steamers and the craft they took with them contained six thousand men, so crowded that a spectator remarked that planks might have been laid on their heads, and that you could have walked about on them; while another testified that he could not have shoved a walking stick between them anywhere.

White men could not have supported it for an hour, but these blacks and Egyptians had a hundred miles to go, and the steamers could not make more than a knot an hour against the rapid stream, now swollen to its fullest.
While they were leaving, the first four companies of the Rifle Brigade arrived.

Every day boats laden with stores went forward, every day white troops came up.