Back on the ship, looking at the lion couchant while the twilight falls and the lights come out along its base. There is no harshness now. The lion's skin has become velvet--it is a veritable lion asleep among fireflies. We lift anchor and steam slowly into the Mediterranean. The lion loses its form, becomes a dark wedge, the thin edge toward Spain. Night deepens as we creep farther around; the wedge shortens, contracts to a cone, a pyramid--the level sea changes to a desert. The feeling somehow grows that Africa has reclaimed its own--the Lion of England has become a pyramid of the sands. IX EARLY MEDITERRANEAN EXPERIENCES Our first day in the Mediterranean was without a flaw. It was a quiet, sunlit day--just pleasantly warm--the ship steady as a rock on that luminous, level sea. No wonder the ancients did not want to leave these placid tides and venture out upon the dark tossing Atlantic which they could see foaming just beyond the Pillars of Hercules. No wonder they peopled those hungry wastes with monsters and evil spirits. Here, on this tranquil sea, there were no unfamiliar dangers. The summer shores that shut them in held all their world--a golden world of romance wherein gods mingled with the affairs of men; where fauns and hamadryads flitted through the groves; where nereids and tritons sported along the waves. We have all day and night to get to Algiers--now less than three hundred miles away--so we are just loafing along making wide circles--"to test the compass," one of the officers said a while ago. I did not know they had to test compasses, and I'm rather doubtful about the matter, still. I suspect that officer is enjoying himself quietly at our expense. I suspect it, because he is the same officer who told the Credulous One the other day when the ship was rolling heavily, that the jarring, beating sound we heard every now and then was made by the ship running over whales. The noise was really made by the screw lifting out of the water, and pounding the surface with its blades, but the Credulous One, who is a trusting soul--a stout lady of middle age and gentle spirit--believed the whale story and repeated it around the ship. She said how many whales there must be down here, and pitied them whenever she heard that cruel sound. That officer came along again, a moment ago, and told us that the mountains nearest are called the Sierra de Gata, which sounds true. Somewhere beyond them lies Grenada and the Alhambra, and there, too, is the old, old city of Cordova, capital of the Moorish kings, and for three hundred years one of the greatest centres of commerce in the world. But these things are only history. What we care for on a day like this is invention--romance--and remembering that somewhere beyond that snowy rim Don Quixote and Sancho wandered through the fields of fancy and the woods of dream makes us wish that we might anchor along those shores and follow that vagrant quest.