"When will the launch go off to the ship?"
"Oh, we don't get the passengers out. You just put yourself in a massoula-boat when you see the ship and go out to it yourself."
We engaged a massoula-boat from him with the agreement that one of the crew should rouse the hotel when the Khedive was sighted. And he did, with such fervor and fury that we all drove at a Gilpin-speed for the harbor lest we miss the ship. Black boatmen ran the last mile beside us, screeching their numbers, holding out their tin license-tags, and dodging the blows of our own courier boatman, who resented any approaches toward his legal fares. We and our trunks and traps were but atoms in the bottom of the cavernous massoula-boat that the black babu had engaged for us—a primitive native boat whose timbers, fitted and tied together, only can withstand the famous Madras surf. Six black man-apes plied arrow-headed poles that passed for oars, and with a wild, resounding chant shot away from the iron pier. We clung to the high gunwales as we stood on the loose lattice of poles and mats and wondered when the first great roller would lift us. But we rowed only a few hundred yards to a ship within the still pool of the artificial harbor, sheltered by a breakwater whose opposing arms, bearing twin lighthouses, were far enough apart for fleets to have manœuvered there after dark. Madras people went past us in dingies and dories and any sort of row-boats, and we in our arks of massoula-boats were as ridiculous as tourists generally are in strange lands. Enough tourists had been duped into engaging these
