He felt the surge of the Atlantic, saw whales spouting in the Bay, marked off the coast of Portugal a lateen sail which first whispered of the East; gazed up at the Rock of Gibraltar, noted there caparisoned Barbs, their head-stalls studded with turquoises to keep the Evil One away, welcomed the Mediterranean sun, and gazed at the snow-capped hills of Crete. In Port Said he landed and saw his first mosque. He examined it with interest. _Very bleak-like_, he wrote home to Mr. Pigott. _More like a chapel than a church. And more like the Quaker Meeting-house in the Moot than either. No stained glass or crucifixes or nothing. I was more at home there than the Catholics_. In the Canal he marked the black hair-tents of the travelling Bedouins, and saw a British Camel Corps trekking slowly across the desert against the hills beyond. He sweated in the Red Sea and gazed with awe at the sultry rocks of Aden, and followed with delight the flying-fish skimming across the Indian Ocean. Then one dawn the engines stopped; the ship lay at rest; and in his nostrils, blown from the land, there was the smell of incense. "Makes you think of the Queen of Sheba," said Ernie. "Spices and Tyre and Sidon and all the rest," and he closed his eyes and saw Mr. Pigott standing with the pointer before the black-board, addressing his class. "Not alf," said his unimaginative friend. "Give me the Pevensey Road o Sadaday nights. Fried fish and chips." They went on deck to find themselves lying in the lovely island-sprinkled harbour of Bombay; boats with curved bamboo yards and brown-skinned crews of pirates under the ship's side; and Parsee money-lenders in shining hats on deck offering to change the money of those who had any. Ernie looked across to the land, lifting blue in the wondrous dawn--the land that was to be his home for the next six years. CHAPTER XIX THE REGIMENT Ernie joined his Battalion in the Central Provinces. The Forest Rangers, as famous in the South Country as the Black Watch in the Highlands, and of far longer pedigree, was first raised from the iron-ore workers by the Hammer Ponds on the Forest Ridge in the heart of the then Black Country of England to meet the imminent onslaught of the Spanish Armada. In those days the Hammer-men, as they were called familiarly from the start, watched the coast from the mouth of the Adur to Rye and Winchelsea; and in the succeeding centuries they left their bloody mark upon the pages of history, the memories of their fellow-countrymen, and the bodies of the King's enemies.