‘Come down, all of you,’ he said. ‘The wireless telegraphy is at work.’
He waited till they were all in the smoking-room, and feverishly examined the tape.
‘Escape of De Wet,’ he read. ‘Disasters to the Imperial Yeomanry. Strike of Cigarette Makers. Great Fire at Hackney.’
‘There!’ he exclaimed triumphantly. ‘We might have gone to bed in London, and not known all that till we got the morning papers to-morrow. And here we are fifty miles from a railway station or a telegraph office—no, we’re nearer Inchnadampf.’
‘Would that I were in the Isle of Apples, Mell Moy, far, far from civilisation!’ said Blake.
“There shall be no grief there or sorrow,” so sings the minstrel of The Wooing of Etain.
“Fresh flesh of swine, banquets of new milk and ale shalt thou have with me then, fair lady,” Merton read out from the book he had been speaking of to the Budes.
‘Jolly place, the Celtic Paradise! Fresh flesh of swine, banquets of ale and new milk. Quel luxe!’
‘Is that the kind of entertainment you were offering me, Mr. Blake?’ asked Miss Macrae gaily. ‘Mr.
Blake,’ she went on, ‘has been inviting me to fly to the undiscovered West beneath the waters, in the magic boat of Bran.’