Chapter 64

When your watch gets out of order you have choice of two things to do:
throw it in the fire or take it to the watch-tinker. The former is the
quickest.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

The Arundel Castle is the finest boat I have seen in these seas. She is
thoroughly modern, and that statement covers a great deal of ground. She
has the usual defect, the common defect, the universal defect, the defect
that has never been missing from any ship that ever sailed--she has
imperfect beds. Many ships have good beds, but no ship has very good
ones. In the matter of beds all ships have been badly edited, ignorantly
edited, from the beginning. The selection of the beds is given to some
hearty, strong-backed, self-made man, when it ought to be given to a
frail woman accustomed from girlhood to backaches and insomnia. Nothing
is so rare, on either side of the ocean, as a perfect bed; nothing is so
difficult to make. Some of the hotels on both sides provide it, but no
ship ever does or ever did. In Noah's Ark the beds were simply
scandalous. Noah set the fashion, and it will endure in one degree of
modification or another till the next flood.

8 A.M. Passing Isle de Bourbon. Broken-up sky-line of volcanic
mountains in the middle. Surely it would not cost much to repair them,
and it seems inexcusable neglect to leave them as they are.

It seems stupid to send tired men to Europe to rest. It is no proper
rest for the mind to clatter from town to town in the dust and cinders,
and examine galleries and architecture, and be always meeting people and
lunching and teaing and dining, and receiving worrying cables and
letters. And a sea voyage on the Atlantic is of no use--voyage too
short, sea too rough. The peaceful Indian and Pacific Oceans and the
long stretches of time are the healing thing.

May 2, AM. A fair, great ship in sight, almost the first we have seen in
these weeks of lonely voyaging. We are now in the Mozambique Channel,
between Madagascar and South Africa, sailing straight west for Delagoa
Bay.

Last night, the burly chief engineer, middle-aged, was standing telling a
spirited seafaring tale, and had reached the most exciting place, where a
man overboard was washing swiftly astern on the great seas, and uplifting
despairing cries, everybody racing aft in a frenzy of excitement and
fading hope, when the band, which had been silent a moment, began
impressively its closing piece, the English national anthem. As simply
as if he was unconscious of what he was doing, he stopped his story,
uncovered, laid his laced cap against his breast, and slightly bent his
grizzled head. The few bars finished, he put on his cap and took up his
tale again, as naturally as if that interjection of music had