I explored, too.  From the rough-ironed table-linen, the thick tooth-glasses for the drinks, the slummocky set-out of victuals at meals, to the unaccommodating regulations in the curtainless cabin, where they had not yet arrived at bunk-edge trays for morning tea, time and progress had stood still with the P. & O. To be just, there were electric-fan fittings in the cabins, but the fans were charged extra; and there was a rumour, unverified, that one could eat on deck or in one’s cabin without a medical certificate from the doctor.  All the rest was under the old motto:  ’Quis separabit’—­’This is quite separate from other lines.’

‘After all,’ said an Anglo-Indian, whom I was telling about civilised ocean travel, ’they don’t want you Egyptian trippers.  They’re sure of us, because——­’ and he gave me many strong reasons connected with leave, finance, the absence of competition, and the ownership of the Bombay foreshore.

‘But it’s absurd,’ I insisted.  ’The whole concern is out of date.  There’s a notice on my deck forbidding smoking and the use of naked lights, and there’s a lascar messing about the hold-hatch outside my cabin with a candle in a lantern.’

Meantime, our one-screw tub thumped gingerly toward Port Said, because we had no mails aboard, and the Mediterranean, exhausted after severe February hysterics, lay out like oil.

I had some talk with a Scotch quartermaster who complained that lascars are not what they used to be, owing to their habit (but it has existed since the beginning) of signing on as a clan or family—­all sorts together.

The serang said that, for his part, he had noticed no difference in twenty years.  ’Men are always of many kinds, sahib.  And that is because God makes men this and that.  Not all one pattern—­not by any means all one pattern.’  He told me, too, that wages were rising, but the price of ghee, rice, and curry-stuffs was up, too, which was bad for wives and families at Porbandar.  ’And that also is thus, and no talk makes it otherwise.’  After Suez he would have blossomed into thin clothes and long talks, but the bitter spring chill nipped him, as the thought of partings just accomplished and work just ahead chilled the Anglo-Indian contingent.  Little by little one came at the outlines of the old stories—­a sick wife left behind here, a boy there, a daughter at school, a very small daughter trusted to friends or hirelings, certain separation for so many years and no great hope or delight in the future.  It was not a nice India that the tales hinted at.  Here is one that explains a great deal: