Chapter Three.
The Greek Bandit.
A Reminiscence of a Yachting Cruise in the Aegean Sea.
Some few years ago, when I was a youngster, I had what was then the great desire of my heart gratified by being allowed to accompany a party on a yachting cruise to the Mediterranean.
How I enjoyed myself, and how tragically our cruise nearly terminated, I will now proceed to tell.
There were six of us in all on board the yacht. There was dad, one; Captain Buncombe, two; Mr Joe Moynham, three; Bob, four; myself, Charley, five; and dog Rollo, six—though I think, by rights, I ought to have counted Rollo first, as he was the best of us all, and certainly thought the least of himself—brave, fine, black, curly old fellow that he was!
Just as you fellows in England were having the nastiest part of the winter, when there is no skating or snowballing, and only drenching rain and easterly winds, that bring colds and coughs and mumps, we were enjoying the loveliest of blue skies and jolly warm weather, that made swimming in the sea a luxury, and ices after dinner seem like a taste of nectar. We did enjoy ourselves; and had a splendid cruise up the old Mediterranean, going everywhere and seeing everything that was to be seen. Oh, it was jolly! The yacht stopped at Gibraltar, where we climbed the rock and saw the monkeys that lived in the caverns on the top; at Malta, where we went up the “Nothing to Eat” stairs mentioned in Midshipman Easy: and then, sailing up the Levant, the Moonshine—she was eighty tons, and the crack of the RYS—was laid up at anchor for a long time at Alexandria, while we went ashore, going through the Suez Canal, across the desert to Cairo, and thence to the pyramids, after which we started for Greece.
You must know, before we get any further, that Bob and I didn’t want to go anywhere near Greece at all! We had good reasons for this dislike. There were dad and Captain Buncombe—who was what people call an archaeologist, fond of grubbing up old stones and skeletons, and digging like an old mole amongst ruins—continually talking all day long about Marathon and Hymettus, the Parthenon and Chersonese, the Acropolis, and Theseus and Odysseus and all the rest of them, bothering our lives out with questions about Homer and the Iliad, and all such stuff; so, I put it to you candidly, whether it wasn’t almost as bad as being back again at school, making a fellow feel small who was shaky in his Greek and had a bad memory for history?
However, we had scarcely anchored in the Piraeus when some events happened which drove the classics out of the heads of our elders; and I may say that thenceforth we heard no more about the ancients.
There had been a sharp squall shortly before, in which we had been amused by seeing the smart little zebeques, with their snowy white lateen sails, flying before the wind like a flock of small birds frightened by a hawk; and the Moonshine was just coming up to the wind in order to let go her anchor, when Bob and I, who were close together on the forecastle, watching the men preparing for running out and bitting the cable, saw, almost at the same moment, a man’s head in the water right in front of the yacht’s forefoot; then—it all happened as suddenly as a flash of lightning—his hands were thrown up as if in entreaty, although we heard no cry, and he disappeared.