The waves that swung in before this gale rose in breakers against the cliff higher than our masts.  We might go up in their spray if we reached the rocks, but no anchor could check our crawling to doom.  To this day I look back with surprise at the complete freedom, not from fright, but even from a recognition of any real danger impending over us, which I then felt; it was not courage, but a something stronger than myself or my own weakness; it was not even a superstitious faith that I should be preserved from the threatened peril, but a profound and immovable conviction that the danger was not real; and the whole thing was to me simply a magnificent spectacle, in which the apprehension of my shipmates rather perplexed than unnerved me.

In half an hour more, the captain said, our margin of safety would be passed,—­drifting as we then drifted our stern would try conclusions with the cliffs of Cephalonia.  The sun was going down in a wild and lurid sky, a few fragments of clouds still flying from the west, when, almost as the sun touched the horizon, there came a lull; the wind went out as it had come on, died away utterly, and as we got our bows round for Argostoli we could hear the roar of the great waves that broke against the cliffs, and could see in the afterglow the tall breakers mounting up against them.  In ten minutes we were going with all the steam it was safe to carry for Argostoli, where we ran in with the late stars coming out, and our engineers broke out into festive exuberance of spirits as we sat down to dine together at anchor in the tranquil waters of that magnificent port, where the Argonauts had taken refuge long before us.  Blair shook his head at my rallying him, as he said in his broad Scotch tongue, “Ah, but no man of us expected ever to see his wife and bairns again; that I can assure ye.”  We were again indebted to private courtesy for a trip from Syra to Canea, though the delay was long.  I had made an appeal to the commander of our man-of-war on the station to see us back to my post, but received a curt and discourteous refusal.  I am not much surprised when I remember some of the occupants of the consulates in those days.

CHAPTER XXI

THE CRETAN INSURRECTION

Returned to Canea, I found that the Cretan assembly had begun its deliberations at Omalos.  The real agitation began (ten days after my arrival) on its coming down to Boutzounaria, a little village on the edge of the plain of Canea, where it could negotiate with the governor and communicate with the consuls.  There was a plateau from which the plain could be overlooked, so that no surprise was possible, and on which was the spring from which Canea got its water, an aqueduct from the pre-Roman times bringing it to the city.  It was cut by Metellus when he besieged Canea, and at all the crises of Cretan history had been contested by the two parties in its wars.  Long deliberation was required to formulate the petition