I busied myself with the men, bullying them into silence, for I judged it most important to be able to hear the first order that Ranjoor Singh might give; but he gave none just yet, although I heard a lot of talking on the bridge.

“Is this Gallipoli?” the men kept asking me in whispers.

“If it were,” said I, “we should have been blown to little pieces by the guns of both sides before now!” If I had been offered all the world for a reward I could not have guessed our whereabouts, nor what we were likely to do next, but I was very sure we had not reached Gallipoli.

Presently the Turkish seamen began lowering the boats.  There were but four boats, and they made clumsy work of it, but at last all four boats were in the water; and then Ranjoor Singh began at last to give his orders, in a voice and with an air that brought reassurance.  No man could command, as he did who had the least little doubt in his heart of eventual success.  There is even more conviction in a true man’s voice than in his eye.

He ordered us overside eight at a time, and me in the first boat with the first eight.

“Fall them in along the first flat place you find on shore, and wait there for me!” said he.  And I said, “Ha, sahib!” wondering as I swung myself down a swaying rope whether my feet could ever find the boat.  But the sailors pulled the rope’s lower end, and I found myself in a moment wedged into a space into which not one more man could have been crowded.

The waves broke over us, and there was a very evil surf, but the distance to the shore was short and the sailors proved skilful.  We landed safely on a gravelly beach, not so very much wetter than we had been, except for our legs (for we waded the last few yards), and I hunted at once for a piece of level ground.  Just thereabouts it was all nearly level, so I fell my eight men in within twenty yards of the surf, and waited.  I felt tempted to throw out pickets yet afraid not to obey implicitly.  Ranjoor Singh given no order about pickets.

I judge it took more than an hour, and it may have been two hours, to bring all the men and the twenty boxes of cartridges ashore.  At last in three boats came the captain of the ship, and the mate, and the engineer, and nearly all the crew.  Then I grew suddenly afraid and hot sweat burst out all over me, for by the one lantern that had been hung from the ship’s bridge rail to guide the rowers I could see that the ship was moving!  The ship’s captain had climbed out of the last boat and was standing close to it.  I went up to him and seized his shoulder.

“What dog’s work is this?” said I.  “Speak!” I said, shaking him, although he could not talk any tongue that I knew—­but I shook him none-the-less until his teeth chattered, and, his arms being wrapped in that great shawl of his, there was little he could do to prevent me.

As I live, sahib, on the word of a Sikh I swear that not even in that instant did I doubt Ranjoor Singh.  I believed that the Turkish captain might have stabbed him, or that Tugendheim might have played some trick.  But not so the men.  They saw the lantern receding and receding, dancing with the motion of the ship, and they believed themselves deserted.