Kodaks clicked, clergymen beamed, ladies said, "How sweetly picturesque--poor dears"; the Captain murmured, "Damnedest scoundrels unhung--but can't leave 'em to starve"; the "poor dears" smiled largely and ate wolfishly; Moussa Isa bled, and the great steamer resumed her way. "Pat" Brighte (she was Cleopatra Diamond Brighte who married Colonel Dearman of the Gungapur Volunteer Bines) found she had got a splendid snap-shot when her films were developed at Gungapur. A little later she got another when the look-out saw, and a boat picked up, a man who was lying in a little dug-out or _toni_. When able to speak, he told the _serang_[44] of the lascars that he was the sole survivor of a bunder-boat which had turned turtle and sunk. He understood nothing but Hindustani.... Miss Brighte pitied the poor wretch but thought he looked rather horrid.... [44] Native boatswain. The hearts of the castaways were filled with contentment as their stomachs were filled with food, and so busily did they devote themselves to eating, drinking, and sleeping that they forgot all about Moussa Isa beneath the palm-mats. When they chanced upon him he was just alive, and his wound was closed. The attitude in which he had been dumped down upon the cargo (the ostensible and upper strata thereof, consisting of hides and salt, with a hint of ostrich-feathers, coffee, frankincense and myrrh) had favoured his chance of recovery, for, thanks to a friendly bundle, his head was pressed forward to his chest and the lips of the gaping wound in his throat were shut. Moussa Isa was tougher than an Indian chicken. Near Aden his proprietors were captured by an officious and unsympathetic police (Moussa was sent to what he dreamed to be Heaven and later perceived to be a hospital) and while they went to jail, a number of bristly-haired Teutonic gentlemen at the Freidrichstrasse, Arab gentlemen at Muscat, and Afghan gentlemen at Cabul, were made to exercise the virtue of patience. So the would-be murderers of John Robin Ross-Ellison Ilderim Dost Mahommed unintentionally saved him from jail, but never received his acknowledgments.... Discharged from the hospital, Moussa became his own master, a gentleman at large, and, for a time, prospered in the coal-trade. He steered a coal-lighter that journeyed between the shore and the ships.