Читать книгу By-ways on Service: Notes from an Australian Journal онлайн

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But before any snoring is engaged in there is a couple of hours of yarning and repartee and horse-play and mirth of all orders. The band plays; the name of the band is legion aboard, and often several members of the legion are in action simultaneously, blaring out their brazen hearts in some imperial noise about (say) Britannia and the waves and the way she rules them; and if you're one of the dozen ill, you cast up a prayer that she will see fit, in her own time, to rule them rather more straight.

Hardly a night but there is a concert, from which the downright song—as such—is rigidly excluded, and nothing but burlesque will be listened to.

As the sun sets, you may lie and wait the lift of the long southern swell of the Indian Ocean. The sunsets are already coloured with the rich ultra-tropical warmth that caught the imagination of so many who looked on that "Sunset at Agra." "Yet but a little while," you say fondly, "and we shall glide south of that fabled Indian land of spice"; and you shudder at the vileness of contending man. There is danger in the distracting fascination of a voyage of discovery, embraced by this transporting to the land of war. For the old soldier—of whom the fleet carries more than a few—it is hardly possible to realise the utter glow of the imagination in the tyro, seeing for the first time those spaces of the earth he has visualised for twenty years. You, therefore, like a good soldier, put on the breast-plate of common sense, and look up on the fore-masthead at the tiny mouth of fire, delicately gaping and closing, uttering the Morse lingo (St. Elmo's fire, caught and harnessed to human uses, by some collective Prospero) and make an attempt to construe in your clumsy, 'prentice way.