After dinner we went ashore again. It was not much cooler. We wandered into various places of amusement. They were all the same, large dirty halls with a small stage and a piano and hundreds of marble-topped tables where one sat and drank. Atrociously fat women appeared on the stage and sang four songs apiece in bad French. It didn’t matter whether the first song was greeted with stony silence or the damning praise of one sarcastic laugh. Back came each one until she’d finished her repertoire. Getting bored with that I collected a fellow sufferer and together we went out and made our way to the top of the ramparts. The sky looked as if a giant had spilt all the diamonds in the world. They glittered and changed colour. The sea was also powdered as if little bits of diamond dust had dropped from the sky. The air smelled sweet and a little strange, and in that velvety darkness which one could almost touch one’s imagination went rioting. As if that were not enough a guitar somewhere down below was suddenly touched with magic fingers and a little love song floated up in a soft lilting tenor.--We were very silent on the old wall. 4 The next morning on waking up, that song still echoing in our ears, we were hull down. Only a vague disturbance in the blue showed where Malta had been, and but for the tattoo which irritated slightly, it might have been one of the Thousand and One Nights. We arrived at last at Alexandria instead of Gallipoli. The shore authorities lived up to the best standards of the Staff. They said, “Who the devil are you?” And we replied, “The ---- Division.” And they said, “We’ve never heard of you, don’t know where you come from, have no instructions about you, and you’d better buzz off again.” But we beamed at them and said, “To hell with you. We’re going to land,”--and landed. There were no arrangements for horses or men; and M.L.O.’s in all the glory of staff hats and armlets chattered like impotent monkeys. We were busy, however, improvising picketing-ropes from ships’ cables borrowed from the amused ship’s commander and we smiled politely and said, “Yes, it _is_ hot,” and went on with the work. Never heard of the ---- Division? Well, well! Hot? We had never known what heat was before. We thought we did lying about on deck, but when it came to working for hours on end,--tunics disappeared and collars and ties followed them. The horses looked as if they had been out in the rain and left a watery trail as we formed up and marched out of the harbour and through the town. We bivouacked for the night in a rest camp called Karaissi where there wasn’t enough room and tempers ran high until a couple of horses broke loose in the dark and charged the tent in which there were two Colonels. The tent ropes went with a ping and camp beds and clothing and Colonels were mixed up in the sand. No one was hurt, so we emptied the Colonels’ pyjamas, called their servants and went away and laughed.