o get provisions and repair
the rudder at Teneriffe. There they found the town destroyed and two big
liners, with dead still aboard, sunken in the harbour. From there they
got canned food and material for repairs, but their operations were
greatly impeded by the hostility of a band of men amidst the ruins of
the town, who sniped them and tried to drive them away.

At Mogador, they stayed and sent a boat ashore for water, and were
nearly captured by an Arab ruse. Here too they got the Purple Death
aboard, and sailed with it incubating in their blood. The cook sickened
first, and then the mate, and presently every one was down and three
in the forecastle were dead. It chanced to be calm weather, and they
drifted helplessly and indeed careless of their fate backwards towards
the Equator. The captain doctored them all with rum. Nine died all
together, and of the four survivors none understood navigation; when at
last they took heart again and could handle a sail, they made a course
by the stars roughly northward and were already short of food once
more when they fell in with a petrol-driven ship from Rio to Cardiff,
shorthanded by reason of the Purple Death and glad to take them aboard.
So at last, after a year of wandering Bert reached England. He landed in
bright June weather, and found the Purple Death was there just beginning
its ravages.

The people were in a state of panic in Cardiff and many had fled to the
hills, and directly the steamer came to the harbour she was boarded
and her residue of food impounded by some unauthenticated Provisional
Committee. Bert tramped through a country disorganised by pestilence,
foodless, and shaken to the very base of its immemorial order. He came
near death and starvation many times, and once he was drawn into scenes
of violence that might have ended his career. But the Bert Smallways
who tramped from Cardiff to London vaguely "going home," vaguely seeking
something of his own that had no tangible form but Edna, was a very
different person from the Desert Dervish who was swept out of England
in Mr. Butteridge's balloon a year before. He was brown and lean and
enduring, steady-eyed and pestilence-salted, and his mouth, which had
once hung open, shut now like a steel trap. Across his brow ran a white
scar that he had got in a fight on the brig. In Cardiff he had felt
the need of new clothes and a weapon, and had, by means that would have
shocked him a year ago, secured a flannel shir