The difficulties of the next few days—­for which most of the hostages, city-bred and used to the bake-shop round the corner, were unprepared—­ promptly presented themselves.  Lunch-time came, but there was no lunch.  There was not even bread.  Philip and Suydam had tinned things, and the former some cake, which by tea-time that afternoon—­so appallingly soon does the spoiled child of town get down to fundamentals—­seemed an almost immoral luxury.  But the luckless fifty, already unstrung by the worry of the last forty-eight hours, fed on salt sea air, and it was not until sundown that one of the British came to ask what should be done.  Philip dug into his corned beef and what was left of the bread, and so we curled up for the night, the hostages and policemen below, the rest of us in the deck-house, rolled up in all the blankets we had, for one of the Black Sea winds was blowing down the Marmora and it was as cold as November.

The launch came up to Gallipoli wharf in the night and not long after daylight we were shaken out of our blankets to receive the call of the mutessarif, or local governor, a big, slow, saturnine man in semi-riding-clothes, with the red fez and a riding-whip in his hand, who spoke only Turkish and limited himself to few words of that.  He was accompanied by a sort of secretary or political director—­a plump little man, with glasses and a vague, slightly smiling, preoccupied manner, who acted as interpreter.

The governor and Philip were addressed as “Excellence,” the secretary as “Monsieur Le Directeur,” and, considering that all concerned were only half awake, and we only half dressed, the interview, which included the exchange of cigarettes and many salutes, was extremely polite.  We joined the mutessarif and his secretary in a stroll about the town.

It was deserted—­closed shutters, empty houses and shops, not so much as the chance to buy a round, flat loaf of black bread—­a shell of a town, with a few ravenous cats prowling about and forgotten chickens pecking the bare cobblestones.  We saw the shell hole in the little Mohammedan cemetery, where four people, “come to visit the tombs of their fathers,” had been killed, the smashed mosques, yawning house-fronts, and dangling rafters, and there came over one an indescribable irony as one listened, in this Eastern world of blazing sun, blue sky, and blue water, to the same grievances and indignations one had read in London editorials and heard in the beet-fields of Flanders months ago.

The mutessarif took us to a little white villa on the cliff by the sea, with a walled garden, flat black cedar, and a view of the Marmora, and we breakfasted on tea, bread and butter, and eggs.  Meanwhile the hostages had been marched to an empty frame house on the beach, from the upper windows of which, while gendarmes guarded the street-door, they were gloomily peering when we returned to the launch.  Philip, uneasy at the emptiness of the town and leisurely