Page:The Plutocrat (1927).pdf/209



E SLEPT late into the morning, undisturbed by a great to-do and the moving of heavy trunks in the corridor near his cabin; and he finally awoke into a curious, unfamiliar stillness. There was no throbbing from the ship's vitals, and for a few moments the silence was like the noon pause in a village. Drowsily he became conscious of a faraway tooting of little horns; and then, close by, he heard a creaking of wheels and voices shouting vehemently in French just below the open portholes of his cabin. These sounds must be illusion, he thought, for they came from where he had grown used to the liquid rushing and flinging of the sea; it was difficult to understand what Frenchmen and creaking wheels were doing in the water. Suddenly and startlingly there came the loud sonorous braying of a donkey; and at that he sat up, wide awake, in his bed and looked out through the portholes.

What he saw was a white-and-gray town rising upon a crescent of hills in terrace on terrace of thick walls and flat roofs, strangely massive and venerable