"Go to hell," cried Banks, who rarely swore save in a gale of wind. "After you," said Spiller, with what is popularly known as truly Oriental politeness; and as a parting taunt he sang out, "What about them rocks?" "You're an ungrammatical, uneducated man," screamed Banks, dancing furiously. But Green and Wilson waved their caps to each other. For all their way of passing compliments when one gave the other a Western Ocean relief at midnight, they were good friends. The _Simoom_ got to sea inside of forty-eight hours, for Banks lost no time. He had made up his mind to waste some on the next chance he had of looking for his blessed rocks, unless the monsoon blew too hard. They had a fairly decent show running down the coast on the inside of the Laccadivhs, and, taking the usual circumbendibus to the eastward between Keeling and the Chagos Archipelago, picked up beautiful "passage" winds and south-east trades, and went home booming. Green found Banks a first-class "old man," and the _Simoom_ as comfortable as a good bar parlour, compared with the sorry old bug-haunted _Palembang_, where a man's toes got sore with the pedicuring work of cockroaches. He made up his mind to stick to her, as he evidently suited Banks. They both got cracked a little on the _Simoom_ Rocks, and gradually talked themselves into the belief of a shark's-tooth reef a mile long with one special fang that rivalled a young peak of Teneriffe. The _Palembang_ came into Liverpool River about three weeks after the _Simoom_, and Green, back at work after ten days at home, had a high time with Wilson. But the skippers passed each other with their noses in the air as high as squirrels' tails, and never swopped a word in a fortnight. As luck would have it, they were both for Bombay again, only to give Spiller a chance of getting there first, the _Simoom_ was to call at the Cape. Just before the _Palembang_ cleared, Banks and Spiller fell up against each other on the landing stage, and as Spiller was full up to his back-teeth and uvula, he broke silence and went for the upholder of the vigia in high style. He could have taken a first-class in bad language at any Australian back-blocks academy of cursing--and what they don't know in blasphemy there can only be learnt from a low-class Spaniard. So the air was blue from Liverpool to Manchester, and to the Isle of Man, and Banks got up and left. For when he was ashore he was very religious. Even at sea he carried a prayer-book and an odd volume of virulent sermons, of the kind which indicate that no man need forgive any enemy who is not of the same persuasion. But to tell the truth, Banks could have forgiven anything but an insult to his beloved rocks. "Such a man oughtn't to live," he cried angrily, as he went off in a tremulous rage. "He's predestined to the pit!"