I lived absorbed in the splendour of our motion and in the rising and setting of the sun.
Then the sea became smoother, though the good wind held, as the land came out to meet us.
For whole days, it seems, I watched the dry, greenish-brown foothills of the Portuguese coast, with white farms and villages embedded in the valleys, and the fantastic outline of the higher land behind them.
We passed fleets of sardine-fishers in boats that seemed to be absurdly small to be so far from land, and for a whole day we were among a school of dolphins that raced and played around us.
Until I had seen those creatures I always thought a flock of swifts, screaming round the roofs in the evening, were the highest expression in nature of speed and delirious joy in life. But now I long to be a dolphin when I die. As they tore past us in groups and couples on the surface of the water, now leaping clear, now diving deep in a common impulse, one expected to hear great shouts of laughter from them in their play. Yet I was told there are men who shoot them and leave a useless, bloody carcass wallowing in their vessel’s wake.
One evening it fell almost calm, with a deep-red sunset touching the sea to flashes of rose among its blue, and lighting the coast with a purple and orange glow.
One of the Arabs in the fo’c’sle was singing, or rather chanting, in a high-pitched tenor, and at the end of each sentence his hearers chimed in with a deep chorus of “Kham leila, kha-am yome?” (“How many nights, how many days?”)
There was a strange mysterious melody in the monotonous chant which was afterwards to become so familiar. It fixed the whole strange sunset landscape like a dream picture in my mind.
Jakoub came out cursing them. The weird Oriental music ceased, and hatred of Jakoub sprouted anew in my heart.
During all this time we were a cheery, cordial party in the cabin. Edmund seemed to be continually in high spirits as we got farther south and the Astarte continued her record-breaking, and every day I found Captain Welfare more likeable as I got to know him better. He had quite stopped apologising to me for things, and had become used to treating me as a man of like passions with himself. He was very interested in the bishop, not having, as he said, met one before.