With my teeth chattering with valor
But I don't like this war game, and I decided right then and there if they sprung another one, if they added another war risk to the ship for this voyage, I would shake it and go home via Japan.
We stayed in Bombay Harbor until next day at noon, to throw the Germans off her schedule, and she sailed out of her regular course to throw them off her route.
Nights we sail in darkness—her lights out and her wireless out of commission; sailing phantom-like, with no lights to betray her to lurking German cruisers, and by the same token, no lights to warn a ship sailing north and south from ramming her.
I had fully intended to write some travel stuff coming across from Bombay, but shucks! I haven't felt like writing travel stuff—couldn't seem to get down to it.
A speck on the horizon would knock any travel stuff out of my mind—that speck might grow into a German cruiser, and England at war with Germany, and no guns aboard to shoot with! Just a merchant mail ship with twenty million dollars in gold and British troops aboard.
From all the accounts we had been getting of German atrocities, if a German gunboat met with us, she would snitch that twenty million first, help herself to our coal second, and, third, sink us.
That was the consensus of opinion of the handful of English and French passengers aboard. The Arabian Sea is full of sharks, terrible, ferocious, man-eating sharks; and what with anxiously watching specks on the horizon, speculating as to whether those specks would develop into German cruisers, and wondering how salt water tasted, and whether a shark would get me on the way down, with these pleasant thoughts a man of my peculiar temperament couldn't write travel stuff.
I tried, I honestly tried, but only one measly little poem was all I could accomplish on this five days' passage coming across from Bombay to Aden.