utheast."

Captain Rannie was perfectly well aware of all this, but he lacked the
superficial fortitude to discuss it. He kept his head averted while his
employer was speaking, his long wrist with the slave-bangle hanging over
his knee. Change his course! That phrase had two meanings, by Jove! And
his course was east to China, as soon as he could collect. He could do
it. Talking about it to a man who was making fifty times, a hundred
times, more than himself, was horrible to him.

He had got up suddenly and put on his hat, harassed lest this sort of
thing should bring bad luck, for he was superstitious. At the back of
his mind lay an uneasy fear lest that girl business should spoil
everything. Who could foresee the dangers of having a woman on the ship?
His ship! He, who could not bear to go near them at all, who treated
even elderly creatures with brusque discourtesy! It would bring bad
luck.

And now at last he was slipping through the nets, bound out upon a
voyage of almost dismaying possibilities. It was a voyage of no more
than thirty-six hours. Captain Rannie shivered and stood suddenly stock
still by the binnacle as he thought of what was to transpire in those
thirty-six hours. Could he do it? He was beginning to doubt if he could.
He said to the helmsman:

"Keep her south and three points east," and went into the little chart
room.

The AEgean Sea is a sea only in name. It could be more accurately
described as a land-locked archipelago. Emerging from any of the gulfs
of the mainland, gulfs which are nearly always narrow and reentrant
angles with walls of barren and desolate promontories, one can proceed
no more than a few hours' steaming on any course without raising yet
more promontories and the hulls of innumerable islands. Closed to the
southward by the long bulk of Crete lying squarely east and west like a
breakwater, it presents its own individual problems to the navigator,
the politician, and the naval commander. The last named, indeed, was
finding it anything but a joke. The very configuration of the coastline,
which rendered a sally from the Dardanelles a feat of extraordinary
folly and temerity, made it a unique hiding place for the small craft
who slipped out of Volo and emerged from the Trikari Channel after dark.
Submarines, coming round from Pola, could run into rocky inlets in the
evening and would find immense stocks of oil, in cans, cached under
savage rocks up the ravines of almost uninhab