Every one crowded round to look. It was a carefully drawn sketch map of a portion of the Mozambique Channel and the Zanzibar coast, and there was a small island marked with a cross and with its latitude and longitude—S. 13, 25, 8, and E. 33, 39, 18.
Henninger produced a large chart of the East Coast and compared the two. “The place must be just a little south of Mohilla Island,” he said. “It’s two or three hundred miles from Ibo Island, where they’ll look first.”
“How far from here?” asked Hawke, who had come aft while they were talking.
“I don’t know exactly where we are now, but I should think it must be a good eight or nine hundred miles.”
“Good heavens!” Bennett cried in dismay.
“But then it’s five hundred miles or so from Zanzibar, and we may have got started before them. We can run the distance in five or six days, or maybe in less, if this wind holds,” looking up at the gray-streaked southern sky.
“It’ll hold,” said Hawke. “The reis told me last night that the southeast wind blows all the time at this season. It’s a trade-wind, I fancy.”
“And I think,” remarked Henninger, “that there’s a strong current setting north through the channel that will help us two or three knots an hour.”
This important bit of oceanography was indeed corroborated by the chart, and it put the whole party in excellent spirits, not even to be spoiled by the execrable breakfast that was presently brought on deck. Ice, milk, or butter were impossibilities on the Omeyyah, and the provisioning consisted chiefly of American canned goods which did not require cooking, and of mutton and rice which the Moslem in the galley did his usually successful best to spoil. Only in one thing was he an artist; the superb coffee made amends for all the rest.
All that day the log-line was kept running, and showed an average speed of nearly eleven knots, with an increase toward evening as the wind freshened. The adventurers lounged about the decks, with no books to read, with nothing to do, but feeling an exhilaration from the rapid movement of the small craft which a steamer could never give at double the speed. Away to port the coast of Africa showed occasionally as a bluish darkening of the sea-line, and faded again. Two or three dhows like their own passed them beating down the channel, and once a long smear of smoke on the sky indicated a steamer hull down under the eastward horizon.