A little later on, my impressions became confirmed; for, just as we were piped down to breakfast after `wash and scrub decks,' and I was telling Larrikins, who sat alongside me at the mess-table, what I had heard, the engine-room gong sounded, and the word was passed to get up steam as quickly as possible. `Old Hankey Pankey' did not waste time when he had once got his orders; and some couple of hours after we had weighed anchor and were rapidly leaving Zanzibar, with its rows of square stone houses, built with flat roofs in the eastern style, that front the beautiful curving bay, whose white sandy beach is washed by water so clear that you can see the bottom at six fathoms, and which is backed, beyond the warehouses and mansions of the merchants, by the bright greenery of palm trees and dates and other rich tropical growths, the beautiful foliage of which contrasts vividly with the intense whiteness of the buildings and adjacent shore, offering quite a relief to the eye from the glaring sun and coppery sky overhead. "Say, Tom," said Larrikins to me presently, as the two of us, with a lot of the other hands, were polishing up the brasswork of the machine-guns on the upper deck, "d'yer know where we're bound in such a hurry?" "No, Larry," I replied. "Somewhere up the coast, though, I 'spect from what I told you down below." Larrikins chuckled to himself. "Ye'r a fine chap, Tom, to give a fellow h'infumation," he said with a snigger. "I could 'a told you as much meself. Why, carn't I see with 'arf a h'eye we're steerin' to the north'ard up the coast, with the munsoon a-blowin' right in our teeth and the sun on our starb'rd 'and!" I laughed, too, at the sharp wag's rejoinder. "Well, Larry," I said at last, after polishing up the ratchet of the Nordenfeldt I was working at to my personal satisfaction, hoping to have the aiming of it bye-and-bye, "I can't tell you any more than that we are bound up the coast, and are likely to have a brush with the Arabs along there somewhere; but where that somewhere is, my joker, I'm hanged if I know!" "I can tell you, mate," put in a man who was rubbing up the gun at the end of the bridge hard by where we were standing. "We're off for Mombassa again. I heard `old Square toes,' the navigator, tell Mr Chisholm just now. He said we were agoin' to meet the _Merlin_ there, and purseed further up the coast together." "Oh!" said Larry, "that means business, Tom." "Ay," said I, "it does, my hearty, and to tell the truth, Larry, I'm jolly glad of it." So were all hands on board, when the news spread through the ship; and, on our reaching Mombassa late in the afternoon of the same day, steaming fifteen knots all the way, pretty nearly our full speed when the stokehold was not `closed up,' we found the _Merlin_ there before us, as the man on deck had told Larry and me in the morning.