22 TWO DIANAS IN SOMALILAND 
It was just the same as any other sea, only nastier and 
more bumpy. We imagined— Cecily and myself — 
that the boat would do the trip in about sixteen hours. 
She floundered during twenty-four, and I spent most 
of the time on a deck-chair, “ the world forgetting.” 
At intervals Somalis would come up from the depths 
somewhere, cross their hands and pray. I joined 
them every time in spirit. Cecily told me that the 
little cabin was too smelly for words, but in an evil 
minute I consented to be escorted thither for a meal. 
“ She’s not exactly a Cunarder,” sang out the younger 
officer, my kinsman, from the bottom of the com- 
panion, “ but anyway they’ve got us something to eat.” 
They had. Half a dozen different smells pervaded 
the horrid little cabin, green cabbage in the ascendant. 
The place was full of our kit, which seemed to have 
been fired in anyhow from the fo’castle end. With a 
silly desire to suppress the evidence of my obvious dis- 
comfort, I attacked an overloaded plate of underdone 
mutton and cabbage. I tried to keep my eyes off it as 
far as possible ; sometimes it seemed multiplied by 
two, but the greasy gravy had a fatal fascination for 
me, and at last proved my undoing. The elder warrior 
supplied a so-called comfort, in the shape of a pre- 
ventative against sea-sickness, concocted, he said, by 
his mother, which accelerated matters ; and they all 
kindly dragged me on deck again and left me to my- 
self in my misery. All through the night I stayed on 
my seat on deck, not daring to face the cabin and that 
awful smell, which Cecily told me was bilge water. 
It was intensely cold, but, fortunately, I had a lot of 
