As the sun sets, you may lie and wait the lift of the long southern swell of the Indian Ocean. The sunsets are already coloured with the rich ultra-tropical warmth that caught the imagination of so many who looked on that "Sunset at Agra." "Yet but a little while," you say fondly, "and we shall glide south of that fabled Indian land of spice"; and you shudder at the vileness of contending man. There is danger in the distracting fascination of a voyage of discovery, embraced by this transporting to the land of war. For the old soldier—of whom the fleet carries more than a few—it is hardly possible to realise the utter glow of the imagination in the tyro, seeing for the first time those spaces of the earth he has visualised for twenty years. You, therefore, like a good soldier, put on the breast-plate of common sense, and look up on the fore-masthead at the tiny mouth of fire, delicately gaping and closing, uttering the Morse lingo (St. Elmo's fire, caught and harnessed to human uses, by some collective Prospero) and make an attempt to construe in your clumsy, 'prentice way.
Almost you will always fall asleep at this, and lie there a couple of hours. And when you wake you go on lying there; and it is of little consequence whether you lie there all night, or not, in the delicate tropic air. And often you do so, and dream of all things but war.
CHAPTER II
UP THE CANAL
We put into the outer harbour at Aden for some hours to wait for the main fleet, from which we had been parted mysteriously off Colombo. They came in the early morning, handed us a heavy home-mail, and by sundown we were all in motion, steaming up into the heat of the Red Sea. If this is the Red Sea in midwinter, the Lord deliver us from its summer! The heat is beguiled by heavy betting as to the port of disembarkation. But as we get up towards Suez the hand of the war-lords begins to show itself in cryptic paragraphs of troop-ship orders—and the like. Marseilles is our desired haven, and next to that Southampton. But—
It sounds like stories from the land of spirits
If any man get that which he desires,
Or any merit that which he obtains.
Before lunch on the —th the African coast loomed up on the port-bow. About mid-day we were steaming over the traditionally located Israelitish crossing. Curious! the entirely unquestioning attitude of the most blasphemous trooper afloat towards the literal authenticity of Old Testament history. The Higher Criticism has, at any rate, no part with the devil-may-care soldier full of strange oaths. Apparently to a man the troops speak in quite an accepted fashion of the miraculous Israelitish triumph over the Egyptian army: the inference from which is, perhaps, that blasphemy is rather an habitual mannerism in such men than anything deliberate. But after a month's living in their midst it requires no such occasion as this discussion of Mosaic geography to tell you that.
After lunch the Arabian coast also was to be seen. The contrast between the coasts is memorable. It was a warm, grey day, and Arabia showed more delicate than we had yet seen it. The immense mountains were almost beyond sight. All the foreground was opalescent sand shot with tiny cones and ridges of rock, themselves streaked with colour as though sprinkled with the same sand. The effect of opalescence must be purely atmospheric—but it is very beautiful.