houses, multi-colored funnels, scrubby trees, slowly swung to blot out
the glowing Mediterranean and the western hemisphere. Gray desert banks
closed in upon her strictly, slid gently astern, drawing with them to
the vanishing-point the bright lane of traversed water. She gained the
Bitter Lakes; and the red conical buoys, like beads a-stringing, slipped
on and added to the two converging dotted lines.

"Good-by to the West!" thought Rudolph. As he mourned sentimentally at
this lengthening tally of their departure, and tried to quote
appropriate farewells, he was deeply touched and pleased by the sadness
of his emotions. "Now what does Byron say?"

The sombre glow of romantic sentiment faded, however, with the sunset.
That evening, as the ship glided from ruby coal to ruby coal of the
gares, following at a steady six knots the theatric glare of her
search-light along arsenically green cardboard banks, Rudolph paced the
deck in a mood much simpler and more honest. In vain he tried the
half-baked philosophy of youth. It gave no comfort; and watching the
clear desert stars of two mysterious continents, he fell prey to the
unbounded and unintelligible complexity of man's world. His own career
seemed no more dubious than trivial.

Succeeding days only strengthened this mood. The Red Sea passed in a
dream of homesickness, intolerable heat, of a pale blue surface
stretched before aching eyes, and paler strips of pink and gray coast,
faint and distant. Like dreams, too, passed Aden and Colombo; and then,
suddenly, he woke to the most acute interest.

He had ignored his mess-mates at their second-class table; but when the
new passengers from Colombo came to dinner, he heard behind him the