Egyptian women carrying little brown babies; who would believe there could be such figures, such colour and picturesque compositions? It was a short march, but we saw much. So this was the land of Egypt. It was good. What a pity we could see so little of it... There were very smartly dressed French women with faces powdered and painted and scented. Old men with hollow eyes and yellow parchment skins all creased and wrinkled squatted on the cobble-stones, smoking hubble-bubbles and long ivory-stemmed pipes. Arab boys selling oranges ran about the streets. The heat was stifling--the shadows purple-black, the sunlight glared golden-white on the buildings and towers and minarets. Here were curio-shops with queer oriental carvings and alabaster figures. It was like a chapter of my _Thousand-and-One Nights_ come true, and I remembered the gray barracks at Limerick and the incessant drill. At last we marched back through the docks and aboard the Canada. Next morning we were sailing far away upon a blue sea. Just a glimpse of the city of wonderful colour and we were once more creeping closer and closer to the mystery of our unknown venture. Many of us would never pass that way again--and each one wondered sometimes if he would be claimed by that Mechanical Death which none of us fully realised. Only a few short hours--a day or two longer--and we should be plunged into battle. A bullet for one, shrapnel for another, dysentery for a third, a bayonet or death from weakness and starvation. The great game of luck was gathering faster and faster. We loafed about on deck and wondered where we were going and what it would be like... our minds were thinking of the immediate future. Each one tried to make out he didn't care, but each one was thinking upon the same subject--his luck, fate, kismet. How many would return to old England--should I be one; or would the Eastern sunshine blaze down upon my decomposing body on some barren sandy shore? We passed many of the Greek Islands--some came up pink and mauve out of the sea, others were green with vineyards; once or twice a little triangular-sailed boat bobbed along the coast. The uncertainty was a strain, and we felt utterly cut off, until at last we sighted a sandy streak, and later a line of volcanic-looking peaks--the Isle of Lemnos. CHAPTER IX. MAROONED ON LEMNOS ISLAND LEMNOS HARBOUR Within the outer anchorage The ancient Argonauts lay to; Little they dreamt--that dauntless crew-- That here to-day in the sheltered bay Where the seas are still and blue, Great battle-ships should froth and hum, And mighty transport-vessels come Serenely floating through.