a strong man and a mysterious one, pale, inscrutable, with dark,
brooding eyes and velvety manners, calculated to envelop even a cup of
coffee and a couple of boiled eggs in an air of sinister romance.

The chief regretted that the craft was not "a serious passenger boat,"
for we should probably have to spend the night aboard. Arrangements for
the hostages and ourselves would be made at Gallipoli, though just what
they would be it was difficult to say, as there were, he said, no hotels
in the place and the houses were all destroyed.

With this cheerful prospect he bade us farewell, and all being ready, we
waited two hours, and finally, just before noon, with deck-hands hanging
life belts along the rail to be ready for possible English submarines,
churned through the crowded shipping of the Golden Horn, round Stamboul,
and out into the blue Marmora.

The difficulties of the next few days--for which most of the hostages,
city-bred and used to the bake-shop round the corner, were unprepared--
promptly presented themselves. Lunch-time came, but there was no lunch.
There was not even bread. Philip and Suydam had tinned things, and the
former some cake, which by tea-time that afternoon--so appallingly soon
does the spoiled child of town get down to fundamentals--seemed an
almost immoral luxury. But the luckless fifty, already unstrung by the
worry of the last forty-eight hours, fed on salt sea air, and it was not
until sundown that one of the British came to ask what should be done.
Philip dug into his corned beef and what was left of the bread, and so
we curled up for the night, the hostages and policemen below, the rest
of us in the deck-house, rolled up in all the blankets we had, for one
of the Black Sea winds was blowing down the Marmora and it was as cold
as November.