CHAPTER IX

PROCEEDING FORTHWITH TO GALLIPOLI

Sec.1

“Look here, Doe,” said I, with my finger on a map of the Island of Lemnos.  “If you’ve guts enough to walk with me over these five miles of hills to this eastern coast, it strikes me we shall actually see a distant vision of the Peninsula itself.”

Doe looked learnedly at the map.

“With a clear sky and field-glasses we might make out the fatal old spot,” said he.  “Come on—­we’ll try.”

So we turned our faces eastward through the afternoon, unaware that we were about to take a last bird’s-eye view of the great Naval and Military Base of Mudros, and a first peep at the Gallipoli Peninsula, where in less than a hundred hours we should be digging ourselves a home.

We bent our backs to the task of toiling up the hillsides.  We found the slopes carpeted with dry grass and yellow thistles, and sprinkled with loose stones and large lumps of rock.  Long-haired sheep with bells a-tinkle, sleepy black cows, and tiny mules browsed among the arid thistles, or scratched their backs against the broken rocks.

Down into the valleys we went, and up and over the summits.  It was dull prose in the valleys, but fine poetry on the summits.  For, whereas in the valleys we saw nothing but thistles and stones, on the summits we enjoyed extensive views of lap-like hollows nursing little white villages; we caught distant specks, brilliantly lighted in the sun, of the encircling sea; and we wondered at the blood-coloured rocks which suggested volcanic disturbances and lava streams.

After dipping into several depressions and surmounting several yokes, we suddenly overtopped the last ridge and looked down upon a tableland, which bore, like a tray of tea-things, the white buildings of a little village.  The plateau was the edge of Lemnos, and ran to the brink of a jagged cliff.  Beyond lay the empty waters.

“Look,” said Doe, a little dreamily; “now we shall see what we shall see.”

We lay down on the cliff-edge in the attitude of the sphinx, and brought our powerful field-glasses into play.  And through them we saw, in the far-off haze, things that accelerated the beating of our hearts.

There, right away across forty miles of blue AEgean, was a vague, grey line of land.  It was broken in the middle as if it opened a channel to let the sea through.  The grey land, west of the break, was the end of Europe, the sinister Peninsula of Gallipoli.  The break itself, bathed in a gentle mist, was the deadly opening to the Dardanelles.  Presumably, one of those hill-tops, just visible, was old Achi Baba, which had defeated the invaders of Helles; and another, Sari Bair, beneath which lay the invaders of Suvla, wondering if they, too, had been beaten by a paltry hill.

The entrancing sight was bound to work upon Doe’s nature.  Still looking through his glasses, he asked: