'In this particular matter my opinion is worth almost nothing,' said Stephen. 'But as a general principle I should say that any expedition which has been talked about as much as this is unlikely to take the enemy by surprise. It was a common topic in Malta, and there is not a man aboard who does not know where we are bound. On the other hand there is this completely new aspect - the agreement with the French and the coming of the galley with French engineers, gunners and treasure. Of course, I have no knowledge whatsoever of the source of the intelligence or its value; but Mr Pocock was perfectly convinced of its soundness, and Mr Pocock is no fool.'

'I am so glad you think so,' said Jack. 'That was exactly my impression.' He smiled, and in his mind's eye, bright and clear, he saw the Mubara galley pulling steadily northwards, heavily ballasted and swimming rather deep. 'There are still joyful surprises in this world, whatever Mr Martin may say,' he observed. 'I have known dozens of 'em. You heard his sermon, I believe?'

'I was on the mizentop.'

'I could wish he had not talked about the ship like that.' 'Sure, he did it out of compliment to you- a thank-offering.'

'Oh, certainly: do not think me ungrateful. I am sure he meant it very kindly, and am much obliged to him for his politeness. But the hands are out of temper, and Mowett is furious. He says he will never be able to get them to priddy the deck with a whole heart again, nor take pains with the paintwork, now that it has been preached down as a vanity, and as something leading to the knacker's yard.'

'If he had not been interrupted, I am sure he would have made a better fist of it- I am sure he would have made his figurative language clear to the meanest understanding: but even so, unless one is a second Bossuet, perhaps it is a mistake to use tropes and parallels in this eminently unpoetic age.'

'Not so hellfire unpoetical as all that, brother,' said Jack. 'Rowan came out with as fine a thing as ever I heard only this very morning, just before we rigged church. He and the second mate were looking at the six-pounders and he said

"Oh ye mortal engines, whose rude throats

Th'im-mortal Jove's dread clamours counterfeit." '

'Capital, capital. I doubt if Shakespeare could have done much better,' said Stephen, nodding gravely. Of late he had noticed a very vicious tendency in these two young men, a tendency to indulge in bare-faced theft, each confident that the other's reading scarcely went beyond Robinson's Elements of Navigation.

'Wittles is up,' said Killick, appearing in the doorway together with the homely reek of boiled cabbage.

'And now I come to think of it,' went on Jack, emptying his glass, 'perhaps you may be mistaken about tropes and parallels too. I caught the allusion directly, and I said toAllen, "He means the thunder, I believe." "Yes," says Allen, "I smoked it at once." Smoked it at once,' repeated Jack, smiling pleasantly as the possibility of a brilliant play on the words cannon and smoke hovered in his mind. Yet even as he turned the matter over it was eclipsed by an even better thing. 'But perhaps Rowan is a second Bossuet,' he said. His deep, fruity, intensely amused laugh filled 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.'