hat might be done till some other
craft appeared. He finally put us aboard a sort of enlarged tug which
might be going up that afternoon or evening.

It was about midday. The sun blazing down on the crowded fiat; on
boxes, sacks, stevedores wrapped up in all the variegated rags of the
East shuffling in and out of the ships; on gangs digging, piling lumber,
boiling water, cooking soup; on officers in brown uniforms and brown
lamb's-wool caps; on horses, ox-teams, and a vast herd of sheep, which
had just poured out of a transport and spread over the plain, when from
the hill came two shots of warning. An enemy aeroplane was coming!

The gangs scattered like water-bugs when a stone is thrown into the
water. They ran for the hill, dropped into trenches; to the beach and
threw themselves flat on the sand; into the water--all, as they ran,
looking up over their shoulders to where, far overhead, whirred steadily
nearer that tiny, terrible hawk.

A hidden battery roared and--pop!--a little puff of cotton floated in
the sky under the approaching flier. Another and another--all the
nervous little batteries in the hills round about were coming to our
rescue. The bird-man, safely above them, drew on without flinching. We
had looked up at aeroplanes many times before and watched the pretty
chase of the shrapnel, and we leaned out from under the awning to keep
the thing in view. "Look," I said to Suydam; "she's coming right over
us!" And then, all at once, there was a crash, a concussion that hit the
ear like a blow, a geyser of smoke and dust and stones out on the flat
in front of us. Through the smoke I saw a horse with its pack undone and
flopping under its belly, trotting round with the wild aimlessness of
horses in the bull-ring after they have been gored. Men were running,
and, in a tangle of wagons, half a dozen oxen, on the ground, were
giving a few spasmodic kicks.

Men streaked up from the engine-room and across the wharf--after all,
the wharf would be the thing he'd try for--and I found myself out on the
flat with them just as there came another crash, but this time over by
the Barbarossa across the bay. Black smoke was pouring from the Turkish
cruiser as she got under way, and, with the shrapnel puffs chasing
hopelessly after, the flier swung to the southward and out of right.

Officers were galloping about yelling orders; over in the dust where the
bomb had struck, a man was sawing furiously away at the thr