"Rather!" I assented, drawing my coat collar over my ears. "But it's too chilly to stay here, so I think I'll turn in."
"Stay another ten minutes," he continued, pulling out his watch and peering at it by the glow of his cheroot, "and you'll see something that will well repay the trouble of waiting in the cold."
"Now," he added, after a few minutes' interval, "look over there"; and, following the direction of his outstretched arm, I saw nothing but the dim outlines of a break in the sand-hills that fringed the Canal.
Even as I looked, a dazzling red disc appeared to leap above the horizon, and in a moment the desert was flooded with a ruddy light. The moon had risen with all the splendour that is only met with in the rarefied atmosphere of tropic and sub-tropic climes.
In another quarter of an hour it was well above the horizon, bathing the surrounding country in a mellow light and casting long shadows of our spars athwart the opposite bank of the placid Canal.
"Splendid!" I exclaimed.
"Yes," assented my uncle, "and sunrise will be quite as rapid. Now go below and have a good night's rest, and I'm certain you won't turn out till we are nearly clear of this glorified ditch."
Uncle Herbert was right, for I did not awake till nearly noon, to find the cabin sweltering in the midday heat and the "Fortuna" passing through the last of the Bitter Lakes, Ismaïlia having been left astern two hours after daybreak.
A short stay at Suez, and the "Fortuna" cleared the southern entrance to the Canal, the town and the basins of Port Ibrahim being lost to view at a distance of three miles.
Before midnight we had emerged from the Gulf of Suez, catching but a short glimpse of the famous Mount Sinai against the western sky.