On the night of my arrival, once dinner was over, I went on deck and looked down through the rain at the submarines moored alongside. They lay close by, one beside the other, in a pool of radiance cast by a number of electric lights hanging over each open hatchway. Beyond this pool lay the rain and the dark; within it, their sides awash in the clear green water of the bay, their grey bridges and rust-stained superstructures shining in the rain, lay the strange, bulging, crocodilian shapes of steel. There was something unearthly, something not of this world or time in the picture; I might have been looking at invaders of the sleeping earth. The wind swept past in great booming salvoes; rain fell in sloping, liquid rods through the brilliancy of electric lamps burning with a steadiness that had something in it of strange, incomprehensible and out of place in the motion and hullabaloo of the storm. And then, too, a hand appeared on the topmost rung of the nearer ladder, and a bulky sailor, a very human sailor in very human dungarees, poked his head out of the aperture, surveyed the inhospitable night, and disappeared. "He's on Branch's boat. They're going out to-night," said the officer who was guiding me about. "To-night? How on earth will he ever find his way to the open sea?" "Knows the bay like a book. However, if the weather gets any worse, I doubt if the captain will let him go. George will be wild if they don't let him out. Somebody has just reported wreckage off the coast, so there must be a Hun round." "But are not our subs sometimes mistaken for Germans?" "Oh, yes," was the calm answer. I thought of that ominous phrase I had noted in the British records "failed to report," and I remembered the stolid British captain who had said to me, speaking of submarines, "Sometimes nobody knows just what happened. Out there in the deep water, whatever happens, happens in a hurry." My guide and I went below to the officers' corridor. Now and then, through the quiet, a mandolin or guitar could be heard far off twanging some sentimental island ditty, and beneath these sweeter sounds lay a monotonous mechanical humming. "What's that sound?" I asked. "That's the Filipino mess boys having a little festino in their quarters. The humming? Oh, that's the mother-ship's dynamos charging the batteries of Branch's boat. Saves running on the surface." My guide knocked at a door. Within his tidy, little room, the captain who was to go out on patrol was packing the personal belongings he needed on the trip. "Hello, Jally!" he cried cheerily when he saw us. "Come on in. I am only doing a little packing up. What's it like outside?" "Raining same as ever, but I don't think it's blowing up any harder."