“We’re in for trouble, I’m afraid,” he said to Kettle.  “That rock on which she’s settled astern has made a hole in her you could drive a cart through.  I suppose it was a tight-fitting hole at first, but as she settled more and moved about, it’s got enlarged same as the hole in a tin of beef does when you begin to waggle it with the can-opener.”

“Well?”

“Didn’t you hear the report they’ve just sung off from the boats?  Oh, I forgot, you don’t understand Italian.  Well, the news is that the rock’s acted as a can-opener to such fine effect that it’s split a hole in the bottom of the strong room, and those gold boxes have toppled through.”

“And buried themselves in the slime?”

“That’s it.  And Lord knows how many feet they’ve sunk.  It’s dreadful stuff to dig amongst—­slides in on you as soon as you start to dig, and levels up.  They’ll have to brattice as they work.  It’ll be a big job.”

All that day Kettle watched the sea with an anxious eye.  In the two boats men ground at the air-pumps under the aching sunlight.  From below the mud came up in white billows, which danced, and swirled, and eddied as the air bubbles from the divers’ exhaust valves stirred it.  And out beyond, in and among the reefs, and along the distant shore, which swung and shimmered in the heat haze, hungry dhows prowled like carrion birds temporarily driven away from a prey.

Tazzuchi and the chief engineer busied themselves in binding together fragments of fire-bars with iron wire.  The Italian shipmaster had a great notion of the damage his signal-guns could do against a dhow, if they were provided with orthodox solid shot.  As a point of fact they never came into action.  As soon as the second night came down, and the darkness became fairly fixed in hue, there began to crackle out of the distance a desultory rifle fire from every quarter of the compass.  It was not very heavy—­at the outside there were not a score of weapons firing, and it could not be called accurate since not one bullet in twenty so much as hit the steamer; but it was annoying for all that, and as the marksmen and their vessels were completely swallowed up by the blackness of the night, it was impossible to repay their compliments in kind.

Morning showed the damage of one port window smashed, two panes gone from the engine-room skylight, and the air-pump in one of the boats alongside with a plunger neatly cut into two pieces.  But there was a spare air-pump in store, and after dawn came, work went on as usual.  The dhows came no nearer, neither did they go much further away.  They pottered about just beyond rifle shot, and their numbers were slightly increased.  Tazzuchi, full of enthusiasm for his artillery, tried a carefully aimed shot at one of the largest.  But the explosion was quite outdone in noise by the cackle of laughter which followed it.  So slow was the flight of the missile that the eye could trace it.  So short was its journey, and so curved its trajectory, that it came very near to hitting one of the boats of the divers, and the men working there cried out in derision that they would catch cold by being wetted by the spray.