They made their way along the unfamiliar passages to the companion-way; yet even before they reached the deck Stephen felt uneasy in his mind. The ship was leaning over more than she had a right to do tied up against a quay; and the cry of 'Cast loose your guns' did not suit with any kind of preparation for sailing that he knew. But this uneasiness was nothing to the blank consternation that came over both of them when they slowly rose above the coamings and found nothing but pure blue evening sea around them on every hand, the ship bowling along at six and a half knots, and the sun preparing to set in glory right astern, while all along the deck on either side the seamen were wholly taken up with naval activities, as though the land no longer existed. Captain Aubrey had borrowed the Dromedary's six-pounders and by way of recalling the Surprises to some sense of decency, order, and regularity he was putting them through the great-gun exercise, blazing away in dumb-show at a furious rate. 'House your guns,' he said at last. 'A very pitiful exhibition, Mr Mowett. Two minutes and five seconds with little seventeen-hundredweight cannon is a very pitiful exhibition.'
He turned, and his grim expression instantly lightened as he caught sight of Stephen and Martin. They were still both standing transfixed on the penultimate step of the ladder, which cut them off at the knee, and they were both staring away to leeward with their mouths open, looking like a pair of moonstruck landsmen. 'And, poor fellows, I am afraid they are little better,' he thought. 'Mr Martin, sir,' he said, stepping towards them, 'how happy I am to see you again. How do you do?'
'Heavens, sir,' said Martin, weakly shaking his hand and still gazing about the horizon as though land, or a miracle, might appear. 'It seems as though I have been carried away,as though I did not leave the ship in time.'
'No great harm. I dare say we shall see a Valletta fishing-boat that will carry you back, unless you choose to bear us company for a while. We are bound for the Pelusian mouth of the Nile.' A very shocking battle between the Dromedary's carpenter and Hollar, bosun of the Surprise (both irascible men) broke out at this moment, and Captain Aubrey was obliged to break off. But he invited the chaplain to supper, and at this meal Martin said 'Sir, perhaps you were not speaking seriously when you suggested that I should accompany you; but if you were, allow me to say that I should be very happy to do so. I have a month's leave from my ship, and Captain Bennet was good enough to say that he would have no objection whatsoever were I to prolong it by another month, or two, or even more.' Jack knew that Bennet had accepted a parson only under pressure from the former Commander-in- Chief: it was not that Harry Bennet had anticlerical notions, but he dearly loved female company, and as his ship was often on detached service, he often indulged in it. Yet his respect for the cloth was such that he felt he could not ship a miss and a parson at the same time, and this he found a very grievous restraint. 'I should of course pay my battels, and I could perhaps help Dr Maturin, since he has no assistant at the moment: I am not unacquainted with anatomy.'
'With all my heart,' said Jack. 'But I must warn you that we do not mean to linger at Tina. We are to march across a desert filled with serpents of various malignity, as the Doctor puts it . . .'
'I was only quoting Goldsmith,' said Stephen sleepily: the emotions of yesterday and his short night were overpowering him now, and he murmured 'Sopor, coma, lethargy, carus.'
'. . . as far as the Red Sea, where we must carry out a mission that is sure to be strenuous and very hot and uncomfortable, and that may well be dangerous too.' As he spoke he saw a glow of delight spread over Martin's face in spite of obvious efforts to maintain a grave and serious countenance. 'Furthermore,' said Jack, 'I must tell you that the service is not designed for those that wish to gather beetles and henbane on some far coral strand and that grow snappish and petulant when desired to mind their duty. That murmur and look dogged,' he said a little louder; but seeing that Stephen would not respond he ended 'Apart from that I should be very happy to have your company. And so I am sure would all your shipmates in the Worcester: we have not forgotten how you laboured in preparing the oratorio - perhaps some evening we may have a chorus or two; there are several of your old pupils aboard.'
Mr Martin said that the serpents, the exertion, heat, discomfort and danger were a small price to pay for beholding a coral reef, even though it might not be lingered on; that he should certainly do his duty without murmuring; and that he was very happy to be among his old shipmates again.
'Now that I come to think of it,' said Jack, 'I was regretting the absence of a chaplain only this morning. The people are grown horribly dissipated, and it occurred to me that. . .'He had been about to say 'that a thundering Hell-fire sermon might terrify them into good behaviour,' but on recollection it did not seem to him quite the thing to dictate his course to a parson and he went on 'that it would be as well to rig church, so that they might hear some suitable words. Against vice and dissipation, I mean. What now, Killick?'
'Which Mr Mowett asks may he disturb you, sir,' said Killick; and since he liked to be the first with any news going he added 'Don't know where to stow the foreign gent.'
'Beg him to come in: place a chair and fetch another glass.'
The foreign gent was the dragoman; and Mowett, sitting down and drinking a glass of port, asked whether he was to sling his hammock before the mast or aft? And where was he to mess?
'Where dragomans or dragomen mess in general I do not know,' said Jack. 'But the Commander-in-Chief spoke of this one as uncommon clever - particularly recommended by Mr Secretary Wray - so I think he must eat in the gunroom. I saw him for a moment when he came aboard, and although he is said to be so learned he looked a reasonably cheerful soul. I do not think you will regret it, and in any case I hope, I very much hope it will not be for much longer than a week. And it will not be, if only this blessed wind holds - Nelson's wind. Lord, I remember when we were after the French fleet in ninety-eight, and how we ran from the straits of Messina to Alexandria in seven days...' Those long urgent summer days shone clear in his mind, the blue white-flecked sea and fifteen men-of-war racing eastwards on that blessed wind, studdingsails aloft and alow on either side, royals and skysails, and Rear-Admiral Nelson pacing the Vanguard's deck from before sunrise until after sunset: all that, and the fury of the battle by night, with the darkness perpetually torn and lit by gunfire, and in the midst of it all the unbelievably vast explosion as L'Orient blew up, leaving nothing but silence and blackness for several minutes after. He described the search for the French, and had carried the fleet from Alexandria back to Sicily and from Syracuse to Alexandria again - '. . . and there we found them at last, moored in Aboukir Bay' - when the Dromedary gave a modest heave and pitched Stephen, fast asleep, from his chair. Jack made a nimble spring, creditable in a man of his weight but not quite nimble enough to prevent Stephen from striking his forehead on the edge of the table and splitting the skin a handsbreath across: a reasonably close imitation of Nelson's wound at the Nile, and almost as bloody.
'All this confusion and calling out,' said Stephen angrily. 'One would think you had never seen blood before, which is absurd in a band of hired assassins. Mome, capon, malt-horse, lobcock,' - this to Killick - 'hold the basin straight. Mr Mowett, in the top left-hand drawer of my medicine-chest you will find some curved needles with gut already to them; pray be so good as to bring me a pair, together with a phial of styptic in the midmost rack, and a handful of lint. My neckcloth will serve for a bandage: it is already in need of washing.'
'Should you not lie down?' said Jack. 'The loss of blood
'Nonsense. It is merely superficial, I tell you: mere hide, no more. Now, Mr Martin, I will thank you to apply the styptic and to place twelve neat sutures while I hold the lips of the wound.'
