"Well done, my boy! that's twice you've got us all out of a scrape," said Mr. Hawkins, to whom Frank hastily reported what he had seen. "How did you come to think of that port-hole?"
"I'd noticed it when I was shovelling down there, sir, and I thought that must be it."
"Good! I like to see a youngster keep his wits about him. Send up the carpenter to fix it, will you? I won't forget to tell Captain Gray what you've done, depend upon it."
This, of itself, would have been a sufficient "event" for the first day out from Malta; but another was still to come. The next morning Frank noticed two new faces among the firemen, and asked Herrick who they were.
"Stowaways, lad," said the old tar. "We found 'em hid away among the cargo last night, and now we're making 'em work their passage. There was three on 'em altogether, but them two Britishers are all that's any good. The third was a Maltee lubber, who'd never done nothin' but wait at table, and sich; so we jist sent him aft to sarve the officers."
That evening there was a sudden cry of "Fire!" and Frank, to whom the mere thought of a fire at sea had always been a perfect nightmare, was amazed to see how coolly the men got out their hose-pipes and took their appointed stations, without the slightest flurry or confusion. In three minutes all was ready; but happily it proved to be a false alarm.
Ha! what is this long gray band along the southern sky, with one tall white line standing up from it like a mast, and two black bars stretching from its edge far into the bright blue waters? Can it be the coast of Egypt already? It is nothing else. The white streak is Port Said Light-house; the black bars are the walls of its breakwater, running their huge piled-up blocks of "concrete" nearly two miles out to sea.
Frank was greatly amused with the quaint little toy town of 5000 inhabitants, perched between the desert and the sea, where everybody shut up their stores and went to sleep in the middle of the day; where, thanks to the deep soft sand, carriages and horsemen went by as noiselessly as shadows; and where every gust of wind raised a dust-storm that hid people, houses, and everything else. Here, for the first time, he saw a punka, or monster fan, worked by a rope, and hung from the ceiling of a room. He was shown over the light-house by a trim little Arab boy and girl, who, to his great surprise, turned out to be man and wife; and altogether he had plenty of new impressions to think over when he at last found himself fairly afloat upon the Suez Canal.[1]
A narrow ribbon of light green water between two interminable sand-banks, growing gradually higher as they advanced southward; a huge "dredger" every here and there, lying like a castle upon the water, with a clamorous garrison of blue-shirted men and red-capped boys; an occasional tug-boat, disdainfully greeted by Herrick as "Puffing Billy"; a distant caravan, with its endless file of camels and horses and men, melting away in curve after curve, like some mighty serpent, far back into the quivering haze that hovered over the hot brassy desert—such were the main features of the famous passage, begun by Pharaoh-Necho, and finished by Lesseps. The sun was sinking as they cast anchor for the night before Ismailia, and saw the mouth of the Sweetwater Canal, and the docks and houses of the brand-new town which the late sovereign of Egypt built and named after himself, fading into the fast-falling darkness.