With my glasses I swept the empty waters.  At last I saw, sketched over there with palest touch, a line of mountains—­just such a range as a child would draw, one peak having a narrow point, another a rounded summit.  This land lay at so great a distance that it was shadowless, and looked like a long bit of broken slate with its jagged ends uppermost.  I cast in my mind whether Gallipoli loomed like this:  and Gallipoli, somehow, seemed more peaceful since that satisfying event of the morning.

I dropped my glasses.  For the first time I realised that I was setting out to do something difficult for England.  Actually I!  I glowed in the thought, for to-day, if ever, I was in an heroic mood.  I touched for a moment the perfect patriotism.  Yes, if Beauty demanded it, I could give all for England—­all.

As the day went by, we seemed to be rounding that mountainous island, for it lingered on our port, always changing its aspect, but always remaining beautiful.

The whole scene was Beauty.  And this Beauty, urged the voice of the priest, was to have something to say in moments when I must choose between this bad deed and that good one.  Of the two, I was to do the one that was the more like the Mediterranean on a summer day.

Oh, I had a clear enough ideal now.  And why had I never seen before, as Monty had seen, that, just as there was far more beauty in seas and hills than ugliness, so on the whole there was more goodness in human characters than evil, and, assuredly, more happiness in life than pain.  And the old Colonel, too, had seen beauty in youth and strength; he had seen it triumphing in Penny’s death and in all this sanguinary Dardanelles campaign.

Yes, I had closed on the idea.  Even the lively excesses of Major Hardy’s mob, even Jimmy Doon’s cynical humour at the prospect of death had much in them like the Mediterranean on a summer day.

Or, say, on a summer night like this.  For, as the evening wore on, we were still passing this long island; and a pale mist had risen in a narrow ribbon from the sea-line, and hidden a lower belt of its hills from my view, so that the peaks towered like Mount Ararats above a rising flood of fog-damp; and, as this bank of mist rose upward, the sun sank downward, a disc of gold fire.

I followed it with my glasses; and so rapid was its descent that, before I could count a hundred, it had dipped beneath the water-line—­become a flaming semicircle—­then only a glowing rim—­and disappeared.  It left a few minutes’ afterglow, with the sky every shade from crimson at the horizon to blue at the zenith.

The world got darker, and the waves, breaking from the ship’s bows, began to spill a luminous phosphorescence on the sea.  I watched a little longer; and then the stars and the phosphorescent wave-crests glistened in a Mediterranean night.

CHAPTER VI

MAJOR HARDY AND PADRE MONTY FINISH THE VOYAGE