A Mediterranean mystery

by Fred E. Wynne

We passed through the Straits at night, and I awoke in the Mediterranean.

We kept near the southern shore, passing under the savage precipices and gullies of Ceuta. The Rock of Gibraltar I saw only in the distance, standing pointed like a helmet. The wind, still northerly, was now on our beam, and there was less of it, so that our progress, though still steady, was slower than it had been.

For days and days it seemed we hugged the African coast, sometimes so close that we could see the stones and sand on the shingly beach below barren rocky foothills. For the most part the land seemed utterly uninhabited, but occasionally we passed a greener tract, where there were sparse crops and stunted bushes, occasionally a flat-roofed hovel among them, and through Captain Welfare’s telescope I could make out goats and children moving.

It was strange to me to think of the lives of human beings there.

On other days the land would recede quite out of sight as we passed deep bays, and again we passed islets of rock, precipitous and fantastic in form and colour.

So desolate were these places, it seemed as if ours must be the first eyes to see them, impossible to realise that for ages men had known them, charted, mapped and measured them.

The only human incident I can recall in all this time is that Edmund and Welfare quarrelled one night over their game of piquet, and did not speak to each other until after dinner the following evening, when they resumed their play, and each politely insisted that the other had been right. That is one of the beauties of piquet. It can only be rightly conducted in an atmosphere of eighteenth-century courtliness. It is a game for ladies and gentlemen, and soon, alas! will be played no more. I was surprised to find that Welfare played it, and could as soon have pictured him walking a minuet.

I was still dreamily content, and had ceased to have even any curiosity as to our destination; but as we drew nearer to the coast of Egypt I noticed a new preoccupation in Edmund and Welfare. They made long and intimate studies of the chart, and several times I saw them in conversation with Jakoub.

I began to awake with pain to the renewed sense of the responsibilities and anxieties of life. I had forgotten Jakoub, and to remember his existence again brought back to me all the doubt and fear of the future which is the real tragedy of mankind.

I had seen the splendour of the Mediterranean sky, the pageantry of dawn and sunset, of moonrise and the evening star, as they might have appeared to the first man; but now all was tarnished again by human associations. I had to put on life again as one might don a hair-shirt. And I shrank from it.