EXTRA HAND 144

XIV. THE SOU'-WESTER 152

XV. ON LEAVE 157

XVI. THE DUNES 165

XVII. BINDING A SPELL 174

XVIII. A DIVISION ON THE MARCH 179

XIX. HOLLY-HO! 185

XX. THE RUINS 195

XXI. LENT, 1918 201

OLD JUNK

I. The African Coast

I

She is the steamship _Celestine_, and she is but a little lady. The
barometer has fallen, and the wind has risen to hunt the rain. I do not
know where _Celestine_ is going, and, what is better, do not care. This
is December and this is Algiers, and I am tired of white glare and
dust. The trees have slept all day. They have hardly turned a leaf. All
day the sky was without a flaw, and the summer silence outside the
town, where the dry road goes between hedges of arid prickly pears, was
not reticence but vacuity. But I sail tonight, and so the barometer is
falling, and I do not know where _Celestine_ will take me. I do not
care where I go with one whose godparents looked at her and called her
that.

There is one place called Jidjelli we shall see, and there is another
called Collo; and there are many others, whose names I shall never
learn, tucked away in the folds of the North African hills where they
come down to the sea between Algiers and Carthage. They will reveal
themselves as I find my way to Tripoli of Barbary. I am bound for
Tripoli, without any reason except that I like the name and admire
_Celestine_, who is going part of the journey.

But the barometer, wherever I am, seems to know when I embark. It
falls. When I went aboard the wind was howling through the shipping in
the harbour of Algiers. And again, _Celestine_ is French, and so we can
do little more than smile at each other to make visible the friendship
of our two great nations. A cable is clanking slowly, and sailors run
and shout in great excitement, doing things I can see no reason for,
because it is as dark and stormy as the forty days.

Algiers is a formless cluster of lower stars, and presently those stars
begin to revolve about us as though the wind really had got the sky
loose. The _Celestine_ is turn