adiance which
bursts through one's window shutters every morning and makes it seem
enough to look and a waste of time to try to think.

It is the air the gods and heroes used to breathe; they fought and
played, indeed, over these very waters and wind-swept hills. Leander
swam the Dardanelles (or Hellespont) close to where the Irresistible and
Bouvet were sunk; the wind that blew in our faces that morning was the
same that rippled the drapery of the Winged Victory. As we went
chunking southward with our beans and cigarettes, we could see the snows
of Olympus--the Mysian Olympus, at any rate, if not the one where Jove,
the cloud-compelling, used to live, and white-armed Juno, and Pallas,
Blue-Eyed Maid. If only our passports had taken us to Troy we could
have looked down the plains of Ilium to the English and French ships,
and Australian and French colonials fighting up the hillside across the
bay. We got tea from the galley, and-with bread and helva (an
insinuating combination of sugar and oil of sesame, which tastes of
peanuts and is at once a candy and a sort of substitute for butter or
meat) made out a breakfast.

A Turkish soldier, the only other occupant of the deck, surveyed these
preparations impassively; then, taking off his boots, climbed on a
settee and stood there in his big bare feet, with folded hands, facing,
as he thought, toward Mecca. The boat was headed southwest, and he
looked to starboard, so that he faced, as a matter of fact, nearly due
west. He had knelt and touched his forehead twice to the bench, and was
going on with the Mussulman prayer when the captain, a rather elegant
young man who had served in the navy, murmured something as he passed.
The soldier looked round thoughtfully; without embarrassment, surprise,
or hurry stepped from the settee, pointed it toward the Asiatic shore,
and, stepping up again, resumed his devotions.

Five times that day, as the faithful are commanded, he said his prayer--
a sight that followed us everywhere that week. One evening after dusk,
on another boat, a fireman came up from below, climbed on a settee, and
began his prayer. Several passengers, who had not seen him in the dark,
walked in front of him. He broke off, reviled them in true fire-room
style, then with a wide gesture, as though sweeping the air clear ahead
of him all the way to the holy city, began at the beginning again.
Soldiers up in the Gallipoli hills, the captain on the bridge, a
steve