“Oh, get away, Jimmy,” retorted Doe, “you spoil the view.  Look, Rupert—­don’t look out of the bows all the time; turn round and look astern, if you want to see a glorious sunset.”

I turned.  We were steering due east, so the disc of the sun, this still evening, was going down behind our stern.  The sea maintained a hue of sparkling indigo, while the sun encircled itself with widening haloes of gold and orange.  The vision was so gorgeous that I turned again to see its happy effect upon the coast of Spain, and found that the long strip of land had become apple pink.  Meanwhile I was aware that my hands and all my exposed flesh had a covering of sticky moisture, the outcome of a damp wind blowing from grey and melancholy Africa.

“The sirocco,” said someone, and foretold a heavy mist with the night.

It happened so.  The darkness had scarcely succeeded the highly coloured sunset before the raucous booming of the fog-horn sounded from the ship’s funnel, and the whole vessel was surrounded with a thick mist—­African breath again—­which, laden with damp, left everything superficially wet.  The mist continued, and the darkness deepened, as we went through the Straits.  The siren boomed intermittently, and Gibraltar, invisible, flashed Morse messages in long and short shafts of light on the thick, moist atmosphere.  To add to the eerie effect of it all, a ship’s light was hung upon the mast, and cast yellow rays over the fog-damp.

“Beastly shame,” grumbled Doe, looking into the opaque darkness, “we shan’t see the Rock this trip through.  Never mind, we’ll see it on the homeward route.”

“Per-haps,” corrected Jimmy Doon.

Thus we went through the gate into the Mediterranean theatre, where the big battle for those other Straits was being fought.  We left the fog behind us, as we got into wider seas, and steamed into a hot Mediterranean night.

Sec.3

Oh, it was torrid.  Ere we came on deck for our talk with Monty under the stars, we had changed into our coolest things.  And now, awaiting his arrival, I lolled in my deck-chair, clothed in my Cambridge blue sleeping-suit, and Doe lay with his pink stripes peeping from beneath the grey embroidered kimono.

It had become a regular practice, our nightly talk with Monty on what he called “Big Things.”  Certainly he did most of the talking.  But his ideas were so new and illuminating, and he opened up such undreamed-of vistas of thought, that we were pleased to lie lazily and listen.

“What’s it to be to-night?” he began, as he walked up to us; but he suddenly saw our pyjama outfit, and was very rude about it, calling us “popinjays,” and “degenerate aesthetes.”  “My poor boys,” he summed up, as he dropped into the chair, which we had thoughtfully placed between us for his judgment throne, “you can’t help it, but you’re a public nuisance and an offence against society.  What’s it to be to-night?”