Of course it was only a minority, at best, who thus bowed their young heads to the Mass.  The rest remained gentiles without the Law.  And Monty’s undismayed comment was characteristic of him.  “I say, Rupert,” he said, coolly assuming that I was his partner in the work, “We’ve only a few at present, our apostolic few.  But don’t you love these big, handsome boys, who will not come to church?”

One immortal Friday fully forty wandered in to Mass.  Monty was radiant.  Immediately after the service he said to me:  “Come on deck, and have a game of quoits-tennis before breakfast.  Mass first, then tennis—­that’s as it should be.”  We went on deck, and, having fixed the rope that acted as a net, played a hard game.  And, when the first game was finished, Monty, still flushed with his victory down in the smoking room, came and looked at me over the high intervening rope, much as a horse looks over a wall, and proceeded to hold forth: 

“D’you remember that picture, ‘The Vigil,’ Rupert, where a knight is kneeling with his sword before the altar, being consecrated for the work he has in hand?  Well, this voyage is the vigil for these fellows.  Before they step ashore, they shall kneel in front of the same altar, and seek a blessing on their swords.  Hang it! aren’t they young knights setting out on perilous work?  And I’ll prove we have a Church still, and an Altar, and a Vigil.”

Then he asked me what I was stopping for and talking about, and why I didn’t get on with the game.  His spirits were irrepressible.

Sec.2

After tea, on the fourth day, everyone hurried to the boat-deck, for land was on our port side.  There to our left, looking like a long, riftless cloud bank, lay a pale-washed impression of the coast of Spain.  A little town, of which every building seemed a dead white, could be distinguished on the slope of a lofty hill.  There was a long undulation of mountainous country, and a promontory that we were told was Cape Trafalgar.

I should have kept my eyes fixed on this, my first view of Sunny Spain, if there had not been excited talk of another land looming on the starboard side.  Looking quickly that way, I made out the grey wraith of a continent, and realised that, for the first time, Dark Africa had crept, with becomingly mysterious silence, into my range of vision.

Doe let his field-glasses drop, and stared dreamily at the beautiful picture, which was being given us, as we approached in the fall of a summer day towards the famous Straits of Gibraltar.  Not long, however, could his reverie last, for Jimmy Doon poked him in the ribs and said: 

“Wake up.  Do you grasp the fact that you are just about to go through the gate of the Mediterranean, and you’ll be damned lucky if you ever come out through it again?  It’s like going through the entrance of the Colosseum to the lions.  It’s both tedious and unseemly.”