few more miles and he would see. He looked down at the
torn strakes draggling in the water alongside, at the smashed boat, and
the tangled wreckage on the fore-deck. She was very much down by the
head now, he noted. Yet they were making it. It would be any moment now
when the land would open out away to the eastward and he would give the
word to bear away.

And as the sun came up behind the great ranges of Asia and touched the
dark blue above their summits with an electric radiance so that the sea
and the shore, though dark, were yet strangely clear, he saw the white
riffle of contending currents away to port, and got his sure bearings in
the Gulf. And as he rang "Full speed ahead" he heard a step behind him
and felt a quick pressure of his arm.

She was wearing the big blue overcoat, which was Plouff's last
demonstration of his own peculiar and indefatigable usefulness, and her
face glowed in the depths of the up-turned collar. The morning breeze
blew her hair about as she peered eagerly towards the goal of her
desire.

"See!" she cried happily, pointing, one finger showing at the end of the
huge sleeve. "See the town?" She snatched the glasses and held them to
her eyes. "Giaour Ismir!"

"You don't want to get into the boat after all," he said, putting his
arm about her shoulders.

"Me? No! That fool said the ship would go down. Look! Oh, _quelle jolie
ville_!"

"Where?" he said, taking the glasses.

"See!" She pointed into the dim gray stretch of the waters that lay like
a lake in the bosom of immense mountains. He looked and saw what she
meant, a spatter of white on the blue hillside, a tiny sparkle of lights
and clusters of tall cypresses, black against the mists of the morning.
And along the coast on their right lay a gray-green sea of foliage where
the olive groves lined the shore. Range beyond range the mountains
receded, barring the light of the sun and leaving the great city in a
light as mysterious as the dawn of a new world. Far up the Gulf, beyond
the last glitter of the long sea wall, he could see the valleys flooded
with pale golden light from the hidden sun, with white houses looking
down upon the waters from their green nests of cypresses and oaks.

"Why don't they come out?" he wondered half to himself. "Are they all
asleep?"

"Oh, the poor ones, they must come out in a boat. They have no coal,"
she retorted. "Look! there is a little ship sailing out! Tck!"

He looked at it. Well, what coul