There was not a moment to be wasted. The instant the men were aboard Desmond rapidly gave his orders. Fuzl Khan and one of the Mysoreans he sent to carry the barrel to Angria's gallivat. It contained da'ma. They were to break it open, tear down the hangings in the cabin, smear them plentifully, and set light to them from the lantern. Meanwhile Desmond himself, with the rest of the men, set about preparing the gallivat in which he was about to make his next move. The lightest of the line of vessels was the one in which the watchmen had been gambling. It happened that this, with the gallivat next to it, had come into harbor late in the evening from a short scouting cruise, and the sweeps used by their crews had not been carried on shore, as the custom was. The larger vessel had fifty of these sweeps, the smaller thirty. If pursuit was to be checked it was essential that none of them should be left in the enemy's hands, and the work of carrying the fifty from the larger to the smaller vessel took some time. There was no longer the same need for quietness of movement. So long as any great noise and bustle was avoided, the sentinels on the walls of the fort would only suppose, if sounds reached their ears, that the watch on board were securing the gallivats at their moorings. When the sweeps had all been transferred Desmond ordered the prisoners to be brought from Angria's cabin to the smaller vessel. The lashings of their feet were cut in turn; each man was carefully searched, deprived of all weapons, and escorted from the one vessel to the other, his feet being then securely bound as before. On board the smallest gallivat were now Desmond, five of his companions, and eleven helpless Marathas. He had just directed one of the Biluchis to cast loose the lashings between the vessels, and was already congratulating himself that the main difficulties of his venture were past, when he suddenly heard shouts from the direction of the fort. Immediately afterwards the deep notes of the huge gong kept in Angria's courtyard boomed and reverberated across the harbor, echoed at brief intervals by the strident clanging of several smaller gongs in the town. Barely had the first sound reached his ears when he saw a light flash forth from the outermost bastion; to the left of it appeared a second; and soon, along the whole face of the fort, in the dockyard, in the town, innumerable lights dotted the blackness, some stationary, others moving this way and that. Now cries were heard from all sides, growing in volume until the sound was as of some gigantic hornet's nest awakened into angry activity. To the clangor of gongs was added the blare of trumpets, and from the walls of the fort and palace, from the hill beyond, from every cliff along the shore, echoed and re-echoed an immense and furious din.