After it, nothing exciting happened for a long time. Occasionally a few solitary rifle-shots rang out, and sometimes there were rapid bursts of heavy musketry and volleys. Those two field-guns kept on, at intervals, all through the night, but by now they were accustomed to them. Dr. O'Neill, who was trying to sleep, would curse whenever he heard three or four sniping shots, and then perhaps a volley in reply. "Curse those snipers!" he would growl; "they'll start the whole lot of them off again, and I can't sleep."
Eventually the Orphan must have fallen asleep, for the next time he remembered anything it was growing dimly light. He looked out of that big opening in the side, away over the grey water—absolutely still now—and made out the obscure shape of a battleship, the Albion, he knew. To the left he saw, gradually becoming distinct, the lower walls and fantastically crumbled ruins of the Sedd-el-Bahr castle stretching out into the Straits. Putting his head out and looking for'ard, along the side of the River Clyde—rather nervously, because he did not know that the snipers behind those projecting ruins had been withdrawn—he saw two great round bastions and a huge curtain-wall with its battlemented parapet—the main "keep" of the old castle. Down at his feet the "nightmare" man lay in the launch's stern-sheets fast asleep.
Inside the River Clyde there was now sufficient light to see that they had spent the night in a big cargo space, littered with boxes of stores and ammunition, and quite a hundred men lay there soundly sleeping. By the Red Cross badges and by the Red Cross marks on the panniers and store boxes among them, he knew that they were R.A.M.C. orderlies. Two men with blood-stained bandages lay on stretchers—also asleep—and near them his launch's crew. On the opposite side of the ship he saw the planks which filled in the opposite gangway, and close to it a heap of "something" covered with a tarpaulin.
Piggy Carter had gone, and so had Dr. O'Neill and the chief sick-berth steward.
Everything seemed quiet and peaceful, except for some solitary rifle-shots which came, every now and again, from the direction of the cliffs.
A man walked down the ladder smoking a pipe, and winding a woollen scarf round his head in turban fashion. The Orphan recognized him as his R.N.D. friend of the maxims.
"Hullo, youngster! want a smoke? Try one of my 'gaspers'."
The Orphan, who was dying for a cigarette, took one and lighted it. "Did the Turks try again?" he asked.
The Sub-lieutenant shook his head. "Come over here," he said, and showed him the holes made by three 8-inch shells in the deck above, and in the side of the ship where they had gone out.
"That was when we were coming along here. Lucky they didn't burst, for our chaps were packed as thick as thieves. One had his head taken clean off—nothing left of it; two others were killed—we stuck 'em down there in the hold."