The unconcealed hostility with which they regard us is a
marvellous contrast to the natural or purchasable civility or
servility which prevails on British steamers. It has its comic side
too, and we are content to laugh at it, and at all the other
oddities of this vaunted "Mail Line."
Our most serious grievance was the length of time that we were kept
in the damp inter-island region of the Tropic of Capricorn. Early
breakfasts, cold plunge baths, and the perfect ventilation of our
cabins, only just kept us alive. We read, wrote, and talked like
automatons, and our voices sounded thin and far away. We decided
that heat was less felt in exercise, made up an afternoon quoit
party, and played unsheltered from the nearly vertical sun, on decks
so hot that we required thick boots for the protection of our feet,
but for three days were limp and faint, and hardly able to crawl
about or eat. The nights were insupportable. We used to lounge on
the bow, and retire late at night to our cabins, to fight the heat,
and scare rats and kill cockroaches with slippers, until driven by
the solar heat to rise again unrefreshed to wrestle through another
relentless day. We read the "Idylls of the King" and talked of
misty meres and reedy fens, of the cool north, with its purple
hills, leaping streams, and life-giving breezes, of long northern
winters, and ice and snow, but the realities of sultriness and damp
scared away our coolest imaginations.
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