of watching
and discussing these things.

I had often heard of the blue of the Mediterranean. But I must confess
that I rather thought it had been exaggerated by authors, artists and
poets as a fruitful and beautiful source of inspiration.

I never saw such blues before: electric-blue and deep, seething navy
blue, flecked with foam and silver spray; calm lapis-lazuli blue; a
sort of greeny, mummy-case blue; flashing, silk-shot blue, like a
kingfisher's feathers. Sometimes the sea was as calm as a mill-pond, and
you could see down and down and down.

There is a certain milky look in the waters of the Mediterranean which
I never saw anywhere else. What it is I do not know, but it hangs in the
water like a cloud. Once there was a shoal of porpoises playing round
us, and they curled and dived and flopped in the warm blue seas.

At night Hawk and I stood for hours watching first one constellation
"light up," and then another, till the whole purple-velvet of the
Mediterranean night sky was pinholed with the old familiar star-designs.

It struck me as most extraordinary, and almost uncanny, to see the same
old stars we knew in England, still above us, so many hundred miles from
home.

Phosphorescent fragments went floating along beneath us like bits of
broken moonlight.

In watching and talking of these things, I quickly perceived in Hawk
a man who not only noticed small detail and took a real interest in
Nature, but one who had a sound, natural philosophy and a good idea of
the reasonable and scientific explanation of things which so many people
either ignore or look upon as "atheistic."

We did not yet know whither we were sailing. We knew we were part of the
Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, and that was all.

One day we put in at Malta.

Here the fruit-boats, all painted green and red and white and blue, came
rowing out to meet us. The Maltese who manned them stood upto row their
oars-and rowed the right way forwards, instead of facing the wrong
way, as we do in England. They were selling tomatoes and pears, apples,
chocolate, cigars, cigarettes, Turkish delight, and lace.

Continually they cried their goods--

"Cee-gar-ette!"

"Cee-gar-ette!"

"Tomart! Tomart!"

One man recognised us as the Irish Division, and shouted--

"Irish! Irish! My father Irish--from Dundee!"

Here were diving-boys in their own tiny boats, diving for pennies. They
were wonderfully lithe and graceful, with sun-tanned limbs an