We boarded ship, filled with a great, and what seemed to us, an
unappeasable curiosity as to what we were going to see. It was not a
very big ship, in spite of the grandiloquent descriptions in the
advertisements, or the lithograph wherein she cut grandly and evenly
through huge waves to the manifest discomfiture of infinitesimal sailing
craft bobbing alongside. She was manned entirely by Germans. The room
stewards waited at table, cleaned the public saloons, kept the library,
rustled the baggage, and played in the band. That is why we took our
music between meals. Our staterooms were very tiny indeed. Each was
provided with an electric fan; a totally inadequate and rather
aggravating electric fan once we had entered the Red Sea. Just at this
moment we paid it little attention, for we were still in full enjoyment
of sunny France, where, in our own experience, it had rained two months
steadily. Indeed, at this moment it was raining, raining a steady, cold,
sodden drizzle that had not even the grace to pick out the surface of
the harbour in the jolly dancing staccato that goes far to lend
attraction to a genuinely earnest rainstorm.

Down the long quay splashed cabs and omnibuses, their drivers glistening
in wet capes, to discharge under the open shed at the end various hasty
individuals who marshalled long lines of porters with astonishing
impedimenta and drove them up the gang-plank. A half-dozen roughs
lounged aimlessly. A little bent old woman with a shawl over her head
searched here and there. Occasionally she would find a twisted splinter
of wood torn from the piles by a hawser or gouged from the planking by
heavy freight, or kicked from the floor by the hoofs of horses. This she
deposited carefully in a small covered market basket. She was entirely
intent on this minute and rather pathetic task, quite unattending the