Along the sea and lined by the telegraph poles the main coast road wound its way. In the early evening Nobby, Looney, and Johnny went off to reconnoitre, but it was impossible to approach the coast by daylight because of the men moving about, and they had to return to the tower with little additional information. There were five tents for men and a larger one for horses, and though no guns were visible it was very probable that here was a section of a battery for dealing with any boat that might attempt to spy out the nakedness of the land. Two years before that time, Lord Rosebery's yacht, the _Zaida_, had been mined a few miles along the coast at a place called Ayasch Bay, which she had entered for the purpose of landing spies. Four of her officers had come to the prisoners' camp at Kastamoni, and we heard from the three of them who survived that there had been some field-guns on the shore where they were captured. Our resting-place near the tower was an unsatisfactory one. We were close to water, it is true, but we were also close to a track leading down to the coast, and though we were soon to change our minds, we thought at the time that no flies in the world could be as persistent and insatiable as those which all day attacked us. For these reasons, and the additional one of wishing to be nearer the creek which we thought the motor-boat had entered, we decided to move to the ravine half a mile west of our tower. We would visit the well early in the morning and late at night for replenishing our water supply. Accordingly at dusk we again packed up. Our way led us through thick undergrowth along neglected terraces, and at about 6.30 P.M. we were on the edge of the steep-sided valley. By a stroke of luck we almost immediately found a way down to the bottom. Although we were to become all too well acquainted with that ravine, we only found one other possible line of ascent and descent on the tower side, and one path up the western edge. The river-bed, of course, was dry, and filled with huge boulders and thickly overgrown with bushes. Pushing our way through these, we had only gone a quarter of a mile down the ravine when we decided to halt for the night. CHAPTER XIII. ON THE COAST. There was still, however, no time to be lost in discovering and obtaining the motor-tug or other boat, seeing that we had arrived on the coast with barely three days' supply of food. That same night, then, Cochrane and Nobby carried out a reconnaissance, continuing to follow our ravine down towards the sea, in the hope that they would come out opposite the bay into which the tug and her tow had disappeared that afternoon. The remainder settled down to sleep as best they could, without a dinner and on hard and stony beds, taking it in turns at half-hour intervals to keep watch. This was necessary to prevent the two scouts passing them unawares should they return in the dark.