The matter worth recording is that at midnight, the placid moon looking down upon the deck of the _Grampus_ as if it were a stricken field--the corpses lying hideously scattered where they fell--there was a great outcry. The skipper, ever alert, had seen along the moonbeams’ path the oncoming of some suspicious-looking craft. His experience fixed them at once as Arab dhows bent on plunder. Strange how the Arab is a born thief and murderer, as is the Chinese, and neither of them ever feels any compunction for his crimes.
[Illustration: THE DHOWS CREPT CAUTIOUSLY TOWARDS THE IMMOVABLE SHIP.
The dhows crept cautiously towards the immovable ship, and Captain Da Silva watched them coming, the fierce light of battle in his eye. But he wasted no time. He knew that his ship was surrounded by an almost impregnable defence (at night), and so he devoted his leisure to loading carefully the half-dozen Sniders possessed by the ship. (Those old Tower Sniders have gone all over the world.) Then he called up his chums, sailors and harpooners, and no small task it was to get life into them. But he succeeded at last, and then posting them all aft with a Snider and a revolver apiece, and much ammunition, he waited gleefully the advent of the sea Bedawy. They came, and were astonished to find that a barrier of something floating, slimy, massive, and impassable interposed between them and their objective. And while they groped darkling, the Sniders sang their awful song, red spear-points of flame clove the darkness, and many an Arab sank down upon the rough-timbered deck of his buggalow coughing out his foul life. Only an hour, and the attack was over. It would never have been begun but that the Arabs forecasted a helpless merchant ship whose crew they could kill easily as sheep, and with as little compunction, and whose hold they should find crammed with choicest merchandise only awaiting the advent of the enterprising sons of the East.
It seems incredible, but such was the fatigue of the crew that when morning dawned the majority of them were quite unaware of the happenings of the night. Perhaps, dimly through their dreams had come the ping of dropping shots, uneasy shudderings might have accompanied the dying yells of the Arabs, but taking everything all round they knew nothing about it. Nor did they greatly care. The dawn but brought them bone-wrenching toil. Who among them would have given thanks for the paternal (?) care manifested for them by the skipper during the dead hours of the night? For their condition was that so amply and aptly summed up by Moses in his dread warning to the children of Israel: ‘In the morning thou shalt say, Would God it were evening, and in the evening thou shalt say, Would God it were morning.’