the calm to fish with
hand lines. The "cat" was busy forward with the midday meal. The Rector
was pacing the narrow deck astern, scanning the horizon and swearing for
wind. The _Garbosa_ was eating her way slowly along, but to all
appearances she might have been nailed to the surface of that placid
sea. Now, in the distance, a schooner was visible, caught in the calm,
her sails sagging, east-bound, for Malta or Suez, probably. Great
steamers occasionally slipped past along the horizon line, their funnels
smoking, their decks almost level with the water from the loads of
Russian wheat they were carrying from the Black Sea to the Straits.

And the sun rose high in the heavens. The waters shone with a dazzling
glare as though boiling from an infinite conflagration. The decks of
the _Garbosa_ grew hot, and her old timbers cracked stridently as they
shrank. Captain and crew ate dinner under the shade of the sail,
scooping with their spoons in the same spot, drinking deep draughts from
the wine jug to cool their parched throats, their shirts open in front,
sweating in streams, panting from the lifeless sultry calm, enviously
watching the gulls that sailed by just above the water, as though afraid
of the stifling muggy air on high. After their meal, the men walked
about on deck for a time, lazily, and with heavy eyes, drunk with
sunlight rather than with wine; then they went below, one after the
other, throwing themselves flat on boards that were wet with
bilge-water, and sagged under the slightest weight. So the afternoon,
and another night went by.

At dawn the wind freshened, and the _Garbosa_, like an old war-horse
touched with the spur, leapt forward, careering and dancing over the
ruffled waters. About noon clouds of smoke began to rise along the
horizon ahead, and gradually from the girdling sash of green sky, thick
steel masts with battletops, the towers of forts, it seemed, came into
view, and under them, floating castles painted white, spotted black with
thousands of men, going this way and that through their own smoke, now
forming in squares, now stringing out along the whole horizon--a flock
of Leviathans, churning the water with invisible fins.

Algiers could not be far away! That was the French Mediterranean
squadron, out for practice. God, what big boats people were making
nowadays! The smallest of those monsters, the white cruiser, with all
those flags and black balls, that kept going in and out among the ot