We are on the Sinai side of the Blue Trough which colours richly between its shores of light sand. We also are colouring richly. It's far too hot for representative uniform clothing. Yet the clothing is uniform--uniform in respect of a discardment of tunic and cap and a ubiquity of shirt. The broad-brimmed hat and the gauze shirt and the half-bared thigh for us; and the daily bathe. The soldier is very busy indeed--too busy to live--who cannot get time to trudge over to the blue water, doff, and disport himself in that cool, tideless limpidity, which recreates (we are gross, material creatures) his world. The banks swarm with brown, deep-chested nudes; the water is strewn thickly with smooth-haired, colliding Australians, elated by the bodily change almost beyond belief. Desert livers, desert lassitude, and desert shortness of temper, cannot persist in this medium. And the rest of the day is transmuted by it. The Canal adds to efficiency. Ships of all nations pass daily, and ships of all classes at Lloyd's. Those are reckoned A1 which bear women-passengers. Raucous warning to those men who are back to nature on the bank is given as the mail-boat creeps up. Everyone who is wearing his birthday garment plunges and swims out. The ship is surrounded by a sea of heads, and greeted with all the grafted Arabic phrases that Australians have acquired--no, not all; but with all those suited to polite society. The facetious cry for baksheesh rises with a native Arabic insistence (but is responded to with a freedom not customarily extended to natives): "_Sai-eeda!--Baksheesh!--Gib it!--Gib it baksheesh for the baby!--Gib it!--One cigarette!--Gib it tabac!--Gib it half-piastre!--Enta quies!--Quies kiteer!--Kattar kairak!_" as the shower descends: tins of cigarettes and chocolate, and keepsakes that are not edible. There is as much excitement on deck as in the water. There is monotony of sea-travel as well as of desert life; the same encounter interrupts both. And apart from that, one can believe that these peoples are genuinely glad to see each other. The soldiers have looked in the face of no woman for far too long, and the admiration of the women for the fellows is not necessarily feigned. They throw over greetings with the other baksheesh luxuries, and these are returned in kind. The girls are sports in the Australian sense, offering suggestions to come aboard, and go tripping with rather more freedom than they would probably use were there any possibility of an acceptance of the invitation. Inevitably there is one woman (never a girl) in fifty who spoils it all by a touch of Jingoism--calling them brave and noble fellows to their faces, and screaming "Are we downhearted?" in a way Stalky would have disapproved. This is volubly resented in responses to that oratorical question which have no direct reference to the state of their spirits.