the main purport of any great adventure, whether it be a polar expedition, a new

of all precaution, we might be torpedoed at any moment and go down with all hands, or strike a mine and be blown up. We knew that victory or defeat were hanging in the balan

late on the saloon table; the sickly smell of steam and grease and oil from the engine-room; the machine gun fixed at the stern with its waterproof hood; the increasing brilliance of t

deck blistered our naked feet. In a few days we became sun-tanned. Each one of

was very little fresh water to drink. It was July.

out it-a mystery look; it looked like a "juju" country, with its sandy spit running like a

der of a Mediterranean sunset transform in schemes of peacock-blue and beetle-green, down and down, through emerald, pale go

of apparently commonplace souls who could really apprecia

nfess that I rather thought it had been exaggerated by authors, a

spray; calm lapis-lazuli blue; a sort of greeny, mummy-case blue; flashing, silk-shot blue, like a kingf

else. What it is I do not know, but it hangs in the water like a cloud. Once there was a sho

"light up," and then another, till the whole purple-velvet of the Med

anny, to see the same old stars we knew in England

t floating along beneath us

l and took a real interest in Nature, but one who had a sound, natural philosophy and a good idea of the re

ng. We knew we were part of the Mediterra

e put in

anned them stood upto row their oars-and rowed the right way forwards, instead of facing the wrong way, as we do

they cried

gar-e

gar-e

rt! T

us as the Irish Div

My father Iri

ng for pennies. They were wonderfully lithe and gra

r pennies and tins of bully-beef. He was fat and sun-

ef!" he shouted. "Me

retrieve these tins when t

the tobacco and cigarettes exceedingly ch

y we put to

own course, sailing under sealed orders, no one knew whither, n

the yellow sands? ... Mystery and adventure sailed with us-and each day the heat increased. The sun blazed from a br

imagine what desperate adventurers they had suddenly become. Some had never been out of Ireland, others had been as far as Portsmouth, and taken a return

re and there a white dome or a needle-minaret. And so we warped into harbour, through the boom and past the lightships,