ust sung off from the boats? Oh, I
forgot, you don't understand Italian. Well, the news is that the rock's
acted as a can-opener to such fine effect that it's split a hole in the
bottom of the strong room, and those gold boxes have toppled through."

"And buried themselves in the slime?"

"That's it. And Lord knows how many feet they've sunk. It's dreadful
stuff to dig amongst--slides in on you as soon as you start to dig, and
levels up. They'll have to brattice as they work. It'll be a big job."

All that day Kettle watched the sea with an anxious eye. In the two
boats men ground at the air-pumps under the aching sunlight. From below
the mud came up in white billows, which danced, and swirled, and eddied
as the air bubbles from the divers' exhaust valves stirred it. And out
beyond, in and among the reefs, and along the distant shore, which swung
and shimmered in the heat haze, hungry dhows prowled like carrion birds
temporarily driven away from a prey.

Tazzuchi and the chief engineer busied themselves in binding together
fragments of fire-bars with iron wire. The Italian shipmaster had a
great notion of the damage his signal-guns could do against a dhow, if
they were provided with orthodox solid shot. As a point of fact they
never came into action. As soon as the second night came down, and the
darkness became fairly fixed in hue, there began to crackle out of the
distance a desultory rifle fire from every quarter of the compass. It
was not very heavy--at the outside there were not a score of weapons
firing, and it could not be called accurate since not one bullet in
twenty so much as hit the steamer; but it was annoying for all that, and
as the marksmen and their vessels were completely swallowed up by the
blackness of the night, it was impossible to repay their compliments
in kind.

Morning showed the damage of one port window smashed, two panes gone
from the engine-room skylight, and the air-pump in one of the boats
alongside with a plunger neatly cut into two pieces. But there was a
spare air-pump in store, and after dawn came, work went on as usual. The
dhows came no nearer, neither did they go much further away. They
pottered about just beyond rifle shot, and their numbers were slightly
increased. Tazzuchi, full of enthusiasm for his artillery, tried a
carefully aimed shot at one of the largest. But the explosion was quite
outdone in noise by the cackle of laughter which followed it. So slow
was the flight