Chapter Fourteen.
Trinkitat.
The Alligator troopship came tearing along the Red Sea, sending the spray flying from her bows, and churning up the historical water with her screw, just as if it were ordinary commonplace sea-water, without any sacred, classical, or poetical associations! The men gathered on the forecastle and the officers on the poop were alike gazing hard at a town of brilliant whiteness, which became more distinct every minute.
“And that is Suakim,” said one of the group of officers. “It looks very clean at a distance. What is it made of, doctor?”
Doctor MacBean was a middle-aged man who liked the society of young ones because he had one little weakness: he was very fond of holding forth, and young men were more inclined to listen patiently to him than older ones. He was a naturalist, a sportsman, and had been a great traveller. There are men who go through Greece, as they would through Surrey, gleaning nothing; but the doctor was not one of them. If he were only a day in a place he learned all about it, and what he learned he remembered. So that to be in his company was to have an encyclopaedia conveniently at hand, from which you could learn what you wanted to know without the trouble of turning over the leaves. For the rest, such a boy past forty there never was—ready for anything for sport or fun, even to a spice of practical joking; and with all this a grave Scottish face which imposed upon those who had not found him out. But in matters of information he was trustworthy, his passion for fact overcoming his love of mystification.
“Suakim is built of madrepore,” he replied to the above question; “very curious. Houses and mosques all of the same materials as these reefs we are now coming to.”
“Madrepore—why, that is a sort of coral—isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is coral.”
“That’s queer though. My shirt-studs are made of coral; fancy a town built of shirt-studs!”