the cabin, filled the after part of the Dromedary and echoed forward; he went scarlet in the face, and redder still. Killick and Stephen stood looking at him, grinning in spite of themselves, until his breath was gone; and reduced to a wheeze he wiped his eyes and stood up, still murmuring 'A second Bossuet. Oh Lord . . .'
During the course of dinner the smell of cabbage and boiled mutton changed abruptly to that of rotting mud, for the transport, standing in, had crossed the invisible frontier where the westerly breeze reached her not from the open sea but from the Nile delta and the great Pelusian marsh itself. Mr Martin had been rather silent hitherto, in spite of having been invited to drink wine with Captain Aubrey, Mr Adams, Mr Rowan, Dr. Maturin and even, most surprisingly, with the melancholy and extremely abstemious Mr Gill; but now his face lightened. He darted a look of intelligence at Stephen, and as soon as he decently could he left the table.
Stephen had some doses to put up for those invalids who would have to be left behind, but when this was done and the physic and powders entrusted to the Dromedary's first mate, a discreet middle-aged Scotchman, he too hurried on deck. The shore was much closer than he had expected, a long flat shore with a shallow beach of a rufous ochre that made the sea an even more surprising blue: dunes behind it, and beyond the dunes a mound with a fort on top and something in the nature of a village on its flanks: some two miles away on the left hand another mound, and through the shimmering heat there seemed to be ruins scattered over it. A very few palms dotted here and there. Otherwise nothing but an infinity of sand, pale sand, the Desert of Sin.
Mr. Allen had taken everything in but the foretopsail and the ship was gliding in with little more than steerage-way upon her, anchor ready to be dropped and a leadsman in the channels calling the depths in steady sequence. 'By the deep twenty; by the deep eighteen; by the mark seventeen...' Almost every soul aboard was on deck, gazing earnestly at the shore: and gazing, as was usual upon such delicate occasions, in profound silence. It was with some surprise, therefore, that Stephen heard a cheerful hooting from over the side, and when he reached the rail it was with far greater surprise that he saw Hairabedian gambolling in the sea. He had understood that the dragoman often bathed in the Bosphorus, and he had heard him lament that the ship was never becalmed so that he might make a dip; but he had supposed that if the Armenian ever really went out of his depth it was only for a few galvanic, convulsive strokes like his own, certainly nothing like this boisterous amphibian sporting among the billows. Hairabedian easily kept pace with the ship, sometimes flinging his short thick body half out of the water and sometimes diving under her and merging the other side, spouting water like a Triton. But his hallooing and bubbling vexed Mr. Allen, who did not always hear his leadsman's cry: seeing this, Jack leant over the rail and called out 'Mr Hairabedian, pray come aboard at once.
Mr Hairabedian did so and stood there in a pair of black calico drawers tied at the knee and waist with white tapes which gave him a somewhat whimsical appearance: water dripped from his squat, shaggy, barrel-shaped person and from the fringe of black hair round his bald pate, but he had caught the air of disapproval and his broad frog-like grin of delight was gone, replaced by a look of profound submission. His embarrassment did not last, however: Mr. Allen gave the word to let go, the anchor splashed down, the cable ran out, the ship swung head to wind, and the gunner began his eleven-gun salute, this number having been agreed to be given and received long since.
But the gunfire seemed to stun the Turks; or perhaps it had never roused them from their torpor. In any event there was no reply. During the long waiting silence Jack swelled with indignation. For himself he would put up with a good deal of offhand treatment or downright incivility, but he found the least slight to the Royal Navy perfectly intolerable: and this was not the least of slights by any means- the returning of salutes was a very serious matter indeed. Staring at the fort through his telescope he saw that what he had thought to be a village was in fact no more than a collection of tents with a number of asses and camels among them, together with a few depressed, unmilitary figures sitting in the shade - the whole thing was like some dismal, somnolent fair. In the fort itself there was no movement of any kind. 'Mr Hairabedian,' he said, 'jump into your clothes directly. Mr Mowett, go ashore and desire Mr Hairabedian to ask them what they are about - what they are thinking of. Bonden, my gig as quick as you like.'
Hairabedian plunged below, reappeared some moments later in a loose white garment and an embroidered skullcap, and was handed down into the gig by two powerful seamen, as monumentally displeased as their captain. The gig pulled for the shore at racing speed and ran well up the beach with its impetus; but before Mowett and Hairabedian had gone far into the dunes a gun began to utter weakly in the fort and a small party was seen coming down the path to meet them.
Jack did not wish to appear concerned, so passing his telescope to Calamy he began pacing the starboard side of the quarterdeck, his hands behind his back. Dr Maturin, however, had no such scruples; he was not there to uphold King George's dignity nor anyone else's, and he took the telescope from the reefer, training it on the group ashore. They had now reached the boat, and Hairabedian and three or four of the others were arguing in an oriental manner, waving their arms; but before Stephen could make out the nature of their disagreement (if disagreement it was) Martin drew his attention to a very high-flying bird away up in the pure bowl of the sky, planing against the wind on snowy wings, an almost certain spoonbill, and they watched it until the boat returned, bringing with it an Egyptian official, a civilian, worried, pale and drawn. Jack took them below and called for coffee. 'Oh, sir, if you please,' said Hairebedian in a low discreet tone, 'the Effendi may not eat or drink until the sun has set. It is Ramadan.'
'In that case we must not tempt him, nor torment him by drinking it ourselves,' said Jack. 'Killick. Killick, there. Scrub the coffee. Well, now, Mr Hairabedian, what is afoot on shore? Is this gentleman come to invite us to land, or must I blow the fort about his ears?' Hairabedian looked alarmed, but then realizing that this was only Captain Aubrey's wit he gave a dutiful simper: the trouble was that the Dromedary had arrived too soon. She had not been expected until after the fast, and although the civilians had collected the pack animals- it was they that gave the hillside the appearance of a fair - the military officers were by no means ready. In these last days of Ramadan many Moslems retired to pray: Murad Bey was in the mosque at Katia, an hour or two away, and his second-in- command had accompanied a holy man to his retreat along the coast, taking the key of the magazine with them, which accounted for the delay in answering the Dromedary's, salute - the only remaining officer, an odabashi, had been obliged to use what was in the men's powder-horns.
'Is this gentleman the odabashi?' asked Jack.
'Oh no, sir. He is a learned man, an effendi, who writes poetical Arabic letters and speaks Greek. The odabashi is only a brutal soldier, a janissary of about the rank of a boatswain: he dare not leave his post to come aboard without orders, for Murad is a testy, and irascible, and would have him flayed and stuffed and sent to headquarters. But Abbas Effendi, - bowing towards the Egyptian - 'the administrative official, is of quite a different kind: he has come to pay his respects, to assure you that everything in the civilian line - camels, tents, food- has been prepared, and to say that should you find anything wanting he would be happy to supply it. He also wishes to state that the day after tomorrow a large number of boats will be brought from the Menzala to carry your men and their equipment ashore.'
Jack smiled. 'Pray make all proper acknowledgments and tell the Effendi that I am very much obliged to him for his exertions: but he need not trouble with the boats - we have plenty of our own, and in any case by the day after tomorrow I hope to be half way to Suez. Please to ask him whether he can tell us anything about the route to Suez.'
'He says he has travelled upon it several times, sir. A little way south of Tel Farama, the mound over there, it crosses the caravan track to Syria, by a well called Bir ed Dueidar. Then it becomes the pilgrims' road down to the Red Sea, where they take ship for Jeddah. There are other wells, and if they are dry there are the Balah lakes and
