The broom proved a most awkward thing to convey by bike, and it was horribly in the way of my knees. When I was about halfway to the camp I got so tied up with the beastly thing that I fell off, bike and broom on top of me! When I picked myself up I found that the crank of the left pedal had been bent in the fall. However, the machine, though more wobbly than ever, was still ridable, so I finished the journey gingerly and without further accident.
Perhaps it might be well here to describe the camp and its surroundings more minutely. It was pitched about two hundred yards back from the cliffs; and the watch-house, past which the road ran, was about ten yards in front of our tent. The lighthouse was situated some three hundred yards from the cliff’s edge to our left; and right opposite it, on a small point running out into the sea, stood a green beacon some fifteen feet high. Our native boy had built his kitchen of sand-bags on the cliffs just in front of the watch-hut.
The soldiers were now encamped in tents some hundred yards away to the right, and immediately behind our tent was a sort of large stone reservoir for water, with, in front of it, the flagstaff. Rough paths connected the beacon with the lighthouse and the watch-hut.
On our third morning in camp we received a telephone message from a port a long way up the coast, saying that a hostile war-ship was coming down in our direction. We did not attach much importance to this information until the following day, when the enemy was again reported—this time off Kismayne; and as the next morning she was stated to be passing Malindi, we calculated that she ought to be in sight by 3 p.m. Sure enough, almost exactly at 3 I saw smoke on the horizon, and immediately telephoned our ship.
Now we were all three eagerly watching the smoke, and presently the stranger’s masts came into view. They certainly appeared to have “tops,” so she might well be a war-ship of some kind, and our excitement grew until a single funnel hove in sight, whereat our spirits drooped a little, for very few ships of war have only one funnel. Still, as the lower parts of her masts lifted above the horizon, they looked at the distance so like tripods that hope rose high again. Very slowly her hull emerged, and in another ten minutes she was wholly visible. Then the powerful magnifying lens of the range-finder revealed her as unmistakably a collier.
We telephoned the information through to our ship, and very shortly afterwards saw our picket boat manned by an armed crew, and with a 3-pounder in her bows, coming at full speed out of the harbour.
Despite the fact that she was seventeen years old the picket was a very fast boat, and as we watched through our telescopes we soon saw her run alongside the collier, and several figures in duck suits jumped out and ran up the stranger’s gangway. Then our boat shoved off again, and they both came steaming towards the harbour. Shortly afterwards the collier hoisted the code-flag for the day, thereby proving that she was not after all an enemy, and she asked permission to proceed into Kilindini. What a sell! After all our excitement, too! But one gets accustomed to that sort of disappointment; and, after all, there was always the chance that the next alarm would prove genuine.
The collier could not be allowed into Kilindini for some time, as there were already at the moment two ships in the channel on their way out, but as soon as the course was clear she rounded the curve of the island and anchored in the harbour—and that incident was ingloriously closed.