The Ægean Sea is a sea only in name. It could be more accurately described as a land-locked archipelago. Emerging from any of the gulfs of the mainland, gulfs which are nearly always narrow and reëntrant angles with walls of barren and desolate promontories, one can proceed no more than a few hours' steaming on any course without raising yet more promontories and the hulls of innumerable islands. Closed to the southward by the long bulk of Crete lying squarely east and west like a breakwater, it presents its own individual problems to the navigator, the politician, and the naval commander. The last named, indeed, was finding it anything but a joke. The very configuration of the coastline, which rendered a sally from the Dardanelles a feat of extraordinary folly and temerity, made it a unique hiding place for the small craft who slipped out of Volo and emerged from the Trikari Channel after dark. Submarines, coming round from Pola, could run into rocky inlets in the evening and would find immense stocks of oil, in cans, cached under savage rocks up the ravines of almost uninhabited islets of ravishing beauty. Gentlemen in Athens, in a hurry to reach Constantinople, took aëroplanes; but there was another way, across the Ægean Sea, in small sailing ships which were frequently blown out of their course at night and would take refuge in Kaloni, whence it was easy to reach the mainland of Asia Minor. And this business--for it was a business--was so profitable, and the ships of war so few in proportion to the area, that it went on gaily enough "under our noses" as one person said in disgust. Not quite that; but the problem did not grow any simpler when there was yet another neutral government--with ships--at Saloniki, a government that might be almost hysterically sympathetic to the cause of freedom and justice but which might also be imposed upon by conscienceless and unscrupulous merchants already in collusion with other unscrupulous people in Constantinople. This was the situation when the _Kalkis_ turned the great headland of Karaburun and headed south-southeast on the journey from which she never returned. Captain Rannie, staring at the chart on which he had pencilled the greater part of her course, southeast from Cape Kassandra, bearing away from the great three-pronged extremity of the Chalcidice peninsula, was aware that she would not return, but he found himself flinching from the inevitable moment, drawing nearer and nearer when he must face success or failure. When he asked himself, echoing Mr. Dainopoulos, could he do it? He was not sure that he could.