“How’s Keating?” Channing asked.  “I tried to wake him, but I couldn’t.”

The captain kept his binoculars to his eyes, and shut his lips grimly.  “Mr. Keating’s very bad,” he said.  “He had another bottle hidden somewhere, and all last night—­” he broke off with a relieved sigh.  “It’s lucky for him,” he added, lowering the glasses, “that there’ll be no fight to-day.”

Channing gave a gasp of disappointment.  “What do you mean?” he protested.

“You can look for yourself,” said the captain, handing him the glasses.  “They’re at their same old stations.  There’ll be no bombardment to-day.  That’s the Iowa, nearest us, the Oregon’s to starboard of her, and the next is the Indiana.  That little fellow close under the land is the Gloucester.”

He glanced up at the mast to see that the press-boat’s signal was conspicuous, they were drawing within range.

With the naked eye, Channing could see the monster, mouse-colored war-ships, basking in the sun, solemn and motionless in a great crescent, with its one horn resting off the harbor-mouth.  They made great blots on the sparkling, glancing surface of the water.  Above each superstructure, their fighting-tops, giant davits, funnels, and gibbet-like yards twisted into the air, fantastic and incomprehensible, but the bulk below seemed to rest solidly on the bottom of the ocean, like an island of lead.  The muzzles of their guns peered from the turrets as from ramparts of rock.

Channing gave a sigh of admiration.

“Don’t tell me they move,” he said.  “They’re not ships, they’re fortresses!”

On the shore there was no sign of human life nor of human habitation.  Except for the Spanish flag floating over the streaked walls of Morro, and the tiny blockhouse on every mountain-top, the squadron might have been anchored off a deserted coast.  The hills rose from the water’s edge like a wall, their peaks green and glaring in the sun, their valleys dark with shadows.  Nothing moved upon the white beach at their feet, no smoke rose from their ridges, not even a palm stirred.  The great range slept in a blue haze of heat.  But only a few miles distant, masked by its frowning front, lay a gayly colored, red-roofed city, besieged by encircling regiments, a broad bay holding a squadron of great war-ships, and gliding cat-like through its choked undergrowth and crouched among the fronds of its motionless palms were the ragged patriots of the Cuban army, silent, watchful, waiting.  But the great range gave no sign.  It frowned in the sunlight, grim and impenetrable.

“It’s Sunday,” exclaimed the captain.  He pointed with his finger at the decks of the battleships, where hundreds of snow-white figures had gone to quarters.  “It’s church service,” he said, “or it’s general inspection.”