’But I am sheik of the village.  One must not bring devils into a village.  I said I would shoot him.’

‘This matter is in the hands of the law. I judge.’

’What need?  I shot him.  Suppose that your son had brought a devil in a box to your village——­’

They explained to him, at last, that under British rule fathers must hand over devil-dealing children to be shot by the white men (the first step, you see, on the downward path of State aid), and that he must go to prison for several months for interfering with a government shoot.

We are a great race.  There was a pious young judge in Nigeria once, who kept a condemned prisoner waiting very many minutes while he hunted through the Hausa dictionary, word by word, for, ‘May—­God—­have—­mercy—­on—­your—­soul.’

And I heard another tale—­about the Suez Canal this time—­a hint of what may happen some day at Panama.  There was a tramp steamer, loaded with high explosives, on her way to the East, and at the far end of the Canal one of the sailors very naturally upset a lamp in the fo’c’sle.  After a heated interval the crew took to the desert alongside, while the captain and the mate opened all cocks and sank her, not in the fairway but up against a bank, just leaving room for a steamer to squeeze past.  Then the Canal authorities wired to her charterers to know exactly what there might be in her; and it is said that the reply kept them awake of nights, for it was their business to blow her up.

Meantime, traffic had to go through, and a P. & O. steamer came along.  There was the Canal; there was the sunken wreck, marked by one elderly Arab in a little boat with a red flag, and there was about five foot clearance on each side for the P. & O. She went through a-tiptoe, because even fifty tons of dynamite will jar a boat, perceptibly, and the tramp held more—­very much more, not to mention detonators.  By some absurd chance, almost the only passenger who knew about the thing at the time was an old lady rather proud of the secret.

‘Ah,’ she said, in the middle of that agonised glide, ’you may depend upon it that if everybody knew what, I know, they’d all be on the other side of the ship.’

Later on, the authorities blew up the tramp with infinite precautions from some two miles off, for which reason she neither destroyed the Suez Canal nor dislocated the Sweet Water Canal alongside, but merely dug out a hole a hundred feet or a hundred yards deep, and so vanished from Lloyd’s register.

But no stories could divert one long from the peculiarities of that amazing line which exists strictly for itself.  There was a bathroom (occupied) at the windy end of an open alleyway.  In due time the bather came out.

Said the steward, as he swabbed out the tub for his successor:  ’That was the Chief Engineer.  ’E’s been some time.  Must ’ave ’ad a mucky job below, this mornin’.’