he had gone on many a perilous expedition; a dauntless traveller, a pure Arabic scholar, and a skilled negotiator with Eastern chiefs and tribes.
The Etoile was at his service, with her captain and her crew, to take him where he would; there remained but the duties of the Messenger Service to detain him, and these, on application, let him loose. He had so habitually abstained throughout the twenty years of his service from any effort to shirk or shift the most dangerous or most irksome, missions, that as nothing specially required him then, and a courier was daily expected from Russia who could take despatches home in his place, he easily obtained his furlough, and by sunset he weighed anchor.
The yacht steered out of the varied fleet of merchantmen that crowded the Golden Horn, steered out to the open sea, while the scarlet glory of the after-glow lingered in the skies and dyed the waters blood-red in its light. To what fate did he go? he asked himself.
Safer, wiser, better far, he thought, that he should turn back with his familiar comrade and plunge down into the core of Asia, into the old athletic, bracing, vigorous, open-air life, into the pleasures that had never palled of forest and rifle, of lake and mountain,
