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Almost you will always fall asleep at this, and lie there a couple of hours. And when you wake you go on lying there; and it is of little consequence whether you lie there all night, or not, in the delicate tropic air. And often you do so, and dream of all things but war.

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UP THE CANAL

We put into the outer harbour at Aden for some hours to wait for the main fleet, from which we had been parted mysteriously off Colombo. They came in the early morning, handed us a heavy home-mail, and by sundown we were all in motion, steaming up into the heat of the Red Sea. If this is the Red Sea in midwinter, the Lord deliver us from its summer! The heat is beguiled by heavy betting as to the port of disembarkation. But as we get up towards Suez the hand of the war-lords begins to show itself in cryptic paragraphs of troop-ship orders—and the like. Marseilles is our desired haven, and next to that Southampton. But—

It sounds like stories from the land of spirits

If any man get that which he desires,