ufficed to
explain one thought to all of us--no, nor yet ten languages! No word
passed that my ear caught. Yet, ship after ship became aware of
closer unity.

All on our knees on all the ships together we prayed thereafter
thrice a day, our British officers standing bareheaded beneath the
upper awnings, the chin-strap marks showing very plainly on their
cheeks as the way of the British is when they feel emotion. We
prayed, sahib, lest the war be over before we could come and do our
share. I think there was no fear in all that fleet except the fear
lest we come too late. A man might say with truth that we prayed to
more gods than one, but our prayer was one. And we received one
answer.

One morning our ship got up anchor unexpectedly and began to enter
the canal ahead of all the ships bearing Indian troops. The men on
the other ships bayed to us like packs of wolves, in part to give
encouragement but principally jealous. We began to expect to see
France now at any minute--I, who can draw a map of the world and set
the chief cities in the proper place, being as foolish as the rest.
There lay work as well as distance between us and France.

We began to pass men laboring to make the canal banks ready against
attack, but mostly they had no news to give us. Yet at one place,
where we tied to the bank because of delay ahead, a man shouted from
a sand-dune that the kaiser of Germany has turned Muhammadan and now
summons all Islam to destroy the French and British. Doubtless he
mistook us for Muhammadans, being neither the first nor the last to
make that mistake.

So we answered him we were on our way to Berlin to teach the kaiser
his new creed. One man threw a lump of coal at him and he
disappeared, but presently we heard him shouting to the men on the
ship behind. They truly were Muhammadans, but they jeered at him as
loud as we.

After that our officers set us to leading horses up and down the
deck in relays, partly, no doubt, to keep us from talking with other
men on shore, but also for the horses' sake. I remember how flies
came on board and troubled the horses very much. At sea we had
forgotten there were such things as flies, and they left us again
when we left the canal.

At Port Said, which looks like a mean place, we stopped again for
coal. Naked Egyptians--big black men, as tall as I and as
straight--carried it up an inclined plank from a float and cast it by
basketfuls through openings in the ship's side. W