It was a hot, dreamy day when the Eros, followed by the twelve swift Athenian ships, stood out of the harbour of Samos. They gave Miletos a wide berth. This was not a time for fighting; the general had other cares just now, and though his oarsmen pulled their hardest, the pace seemed all too slow for Alkibiades. His first object was to get to Kaunos, in Karia, before Tissaphernes left that port. Tissaphernes, he believed, must stop at Kaunos for water.
The great eyes carved on the prow of the good ship Eros seemed to start with expectation and impatience as it breasted the smooth sea. By Kos and Knidos they scudded on. They saw the Spartan ships that had been left in Rhodes harbour still lying there, as at last with full swing they turned up north-easterly to Kaunos before the sun had set. But for all this haste, when they reached the port the Persian satrap and his Spartan monitors had been there and were gone.
They got in water and what provisions were required, and left again at daybreak, the sea still smooth as glass. Not a breath of wind came to fill the sails, and though a hundred times that day Alkibiades reminded himself that Tissaphernes and the Spartans were as much delayed by the incidents of weather as he was, it was difficult to console himself with that thought. He wanted to go fast and faster, to keep pace with his anxious mind.
‘Are we gaining on them?’ he said to Antiochos, his pilot.
Antiochos did not know. No one knew. They only knew that the Persian state ship was the swiftest one the Viceroy had, and that the Spartans were not likely to have chosen slow ones for their present purpose.
Phaselis was the next port Tissaphernes must make for on his journey to Aspendos.
‘When could they reach Phaselis? Can anyone see Phaselis? Were there three triremes anywhere ahead?’
‘No; only land on the left-hand side, no triremes.’
He called to the master of the rowers to redouble the vigour and the quickness of their strokes. But the poor sweating rowers had all day been toiling their very hardest at the oars. No Persian slaves on the state trireme, for all the whips of all the masters, could ever row like these men.
‘We must be gaining on them.’