He slipped through the barrier gate, signaled clumsily to a boatman, crawled under the drunken little awning of the dinghy, and steered a landsman's course along the shining Canal toward the black wall of a German mail-boat.

Cramping the Arab's oar along the iron side, he bumped the landing-stage.

Safe on deck, he became in a moment stiff and haughty, greeting a fellow passenger here and there with a half-military salute.

All afternoon he sat or walked alone, unapproachable, eyeing with a fierce and gloomy stare the squalid front of wooden houses on the African side, the gray desert glare of Asia, the pale blue ribbon of the great Canal stretching southward into the unknown.
He composed melancholy German verses in a note-book.

He recalled famous exiles--Camoens, Napoleon, Byron--and essayed to copy something of all three in his attitude.