The _Spark_ stood on to the north-west until the Vardar marshes showed as an olive-green rim around the bend of the gulf, before turning southward again to skirt the steep shingle-strewn beach along the alluvial "fans" spreading down to the sea from the base of Olympus. The wild-looking Thessalian shepherds were just driving their motley flocks down to the open foreshore to freshen up in the rising midday sea breeze, and it was when I assured Jock Campbell (where I found him leaning on the breech of the after gun and staring landwards with his bushy brows puckered in the incredulous scowl of a man who can't credit the evidence of his own eyes) that it was an actual fact that the fuzzy black sheep were wading in and drinking--if sparingly--of the salt water, that a basis of conversation was finally established. Up to that moment he had given no sign that any of my carelessly thrown out tentatives had penetrated to his ears through the "telepad" rig-out which established his connection with the gunnery control. But when, bringing my lips close to his nearest "ear-muff," I shouted that I had come up along that coast from Lharissa but a few weeks previously by motor and pack-train, and that, in lieu of any fresh water for many miles in either direction, I had actually seen the sheep and goats drinking in flocks from the sea, the look of hostile suspicion in his eyes was replaced by one of friendly interest. "Weel, weel, y'u dinna say so?" he ejaculated, easing away the edge of the helmet over one ear; "the puir wee beasties!" Then he volunteered that he had once kept from freezing to death in a snowstorm on Ben Nevis by curling up among his sheep, and I told how I had once sheared sheep (not mentioning it was for only half a day, and that my "clip" was composed of about equal parts mutton and wool) on a back blocks station in Queensland. Then he described how he had seen a big merino ram butt a Ford car off the road up Thurso way, and I--with more finesse than veracity--capped that with a yarn of how I had seen a flock of Macedonian sheep blown up by a Bulgarian air-bomb, and how one of them had landed unhurt upon a passing motor lorry load of forage--and gone right on grazing! I reckoned that might be calculated to remind Jock of something of the same character which had befallen him on a certain memorable occasion, and I was not disappointed. "'Twas verra like wha' cam ma way on the nicht the _Bow_ rammed the _Seagull_ at the fecht aff Jutland," he commented instantly, with no trace of suspicion in his voice. "Wad ye care to hear aboot it? Ye wud? Weel, then----." As brief, as direct and to the point was the plain unvarnished tale Jock Campbell told me the while a noon-day storm awoke reverberant echoes of the Jovian thunders in the snow-caverns of Olympus and the _Spark_ hunted down through the jade green waters of the Thessalian coast for a U-boat that was supposed to be lurking in their lucent depths "somewhere off Volo."