"Put it there, old man," said White, thrusting his hand through the hole that linked our respective tanks. "We're leaving Turkey at last!"
But not yet were we leaving Turkey. The noise from the engine-room was merely that of a pump preparing the pressure. After three-quarters of an hour it quieted as suddenly as it had begun, and we realized that the Batoum was still moored in the Bosphorus, between Seraglio Point and the Sultan's palace of Dolma Bagtche.
And then, soon after noon, came the real music for which we had waited so anxiously. The telegraph from the bridge tinkled, a fuller and more throaty rhythm came from the engine-room, loud grinding and rattling from the deck testified that the anchor had parted company with the bottom of the Bosphorus. A few minutes later we felt the ship swinging round, and a swishing and rushing of water told us that this time we really were away. In silence we shook hands again.
For long hours we remained in the slimy tanks, crouched on the sodden mattresses. But it was no longer purgatory. The swish-swish of the screw chased away all sensation of discomfort, and there remained only the realization that we had left Constantinople and soon would have left Turkey. My old habit of subconsciously fitting metre and rhymes to mechanical rhythm, to which I had succumbed many times when seated behind aeroplane motors, began to assert itself as we sat in the darkness and listened to the penetrating throb-throb from the engine-room above us. Incongruously enough the unbidden lines that continued to pass maddeningly through my mind, in time with the steady rise and fall of the piston, were those of a G. K. Chesterton ballad:
If I had been a heathen
I'd have kissed Naera's curls,
And filled my life with love affairs,
My house with dancing girls.
But Higgins is a heathen;
And to meetings he is forced