Tide Marks by H.M. Tomlinson — Read

We had seen the shadow of Crete in the north, and the next noon our ship was somewhere off the Nile. Despite its antiquity the sky was still in its first bloom, and the sea was its perfect reflection. It was easy to feel older than the sky and the sea, for our ship was solitary in the very waters where, out of the traffic in ideas and commodities between Knossos and Memphis, had grown the Athens of Pericles, and Rome and Paris, London and New York. If there is anything to be said of that awful thought, perhaps it would never do to say it here. It may be altogether too late in the day to brood with fond and kindling eye upon the cradle of that particular deep which rocked our childhood into the beginnings of Chicago and Manchester. Let us say nothing about it.

The next sunrise it was the skipper himself who called me. This was a genuinely surprising event. His white figure was even startling, for to me then he had become a senior master mariner in a service so august as our blue funnel, the house flag of which is, I suspect, east of Suez, more potent than the emblems of not a few proud states. The honor was unusual enough to cause me to strike my forehead against the opened port as I sat up respectfully. Our master has been at sea for forty years, so his appearance of weariness and of ironic understanding may mean that his experience of men has been extensive, or it may mean nothing. "We are entering Egypt," was all he said, while his lean hands rested on the edge of the bunk; he then turned away as if he supposed this sort of thing would never end. But possibly he had been up all night.