Leaving him with the foreloper of the first wagon, I stood fast and listened intently while the whole of the six great lumbering wagons, drawn by their teams averaging four-and-twenty oxen, crept past me.

The forelopers walked slouching along, shouldering a bamboo sixteen or eighteen feet long, without so much as turning their heads in my direction; and the drivers on the wagon-boxes were sitting with heads down and shoulders raised, apparently asleep and troubled about nothing.

They all trusted to the front wagon for guidance, as their teams, until the oxen were tired, needed no driving whatever, but followed stolidly in the track of those in front.
So slow!--so awfully slow! when I wanted them to go in a thunderous gallop! Yet I knew this was folly.

I wanted to play the hare, though I knew that in this case the tortoise would win the race; for to have hurried meant some accident, some breaking of the heavy wains: a wheel off or broken, the giving way of trek-tow or dissel-boom.

There was nothing for it, I knew, but to proceed at the oxen's steady crawl, which had this advantage: the wagons made very little noise passing over the soft earth, the oxen none at all worth mention.