ng range.

Up the hill we spun, and through the pretty suburb, with its
orange-trees, and its tattered palms, and its sprawling clumps of
prickly pears; and past Porto Pi, the silted-up Carthaginian harbour;
and then, leaving population and tram-lines behind, we opened out on to
the magnificent road that sweeps round the western horn of Palma Bay.
But always at a fixed distance in front of us hovered a billowing halo
of amber-coloured dust, which no frenzied strain on our part could
bring a metre nearer.

Once where the road wound in stately zigzags down the cliff of a slope,
our driver took the ditch and cut an angle, heading across the rough
ground which intervened; but the pace had to be lessened, and the
carriage was nearly wrenched to pieces, and the experiment was not
repeated. We had lost time by it.

And so the race continued, and the monotony of it dulled our interest
in surroundings.

We thought only of the conclusion. Where the actual winning-post could
be we had given up trying to conjecture. "It seems," Haigh remarked
once, "that those two fools have made up their minds to race round this
five-franc bit of an island for so long as we three fools choose to
chivy them. It's a mad set-out whichever side you take it from, and the
fun's evaporating. I don't know what you chaps are going to do, but the
next chance I see I'm going to get down for a drink. I'm parched within
an inch of dissolution."

How long this state of things went on I can't tell. I was bruised by
the bumping from hat to heel, and was much engaged in fending myself
against further abrasions. But at last a sharp cry from the driver
roused me to look out of one of the window-ports, and I saw that we had
opened out a small bay that was backed by a high rocky island of red
and yellow stone. One end of the island showed a curious profile of a
man's face, and I recognized it as Dragonera; but what the bay was
called I didn't remember, though I had a sort of dim recollection of an
anchorage for small craft there.

Anchorage it was sure enough too, for as we rose the inlet further, I
saw a small screw boat riding there to some sort of moorings and
lifting languidly to the swell. She was an ex-yacht, Cowes or Clyde
built for a wager, of the sort one sees in small Mediterranean ports
for the petty coasting traffic; a lean, slender craft of some eighty or
hundred tons register, with all her pristine smartness thoroughly
submerged in southern happy