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He turned his head and gazed at me. His eyes were violet in colour, shot through with tiny threads of orange. I had never seen their like before. I could see no expression that I recognized in them, nothing human at all.

'The deepest,' he said quietly. 'This journey worries me. We're too exposed.

If Baron Maupertuis or his mysterious hooded colleague wish to stop us, we're sitting here like horda in a pit.'

'Like what?'

He smiled suddenly, and his face was transformed from sulky glower to almost imbecilic happiness.

°I mean, like china ducks in a shooting gallery.' He sighed. 'I won't feel safe until we get to Bombay.'

I gazed out across the water, but in my mind it was a different sea and I was just a boy.

'I remember, many years ago,' I murmured, more to myself than to the Doctor, 'travelling to Australia with my father and brother in a decrepit barque with a leaky hull and a cracked main spar. We rounded the Cape of Good Hope in the middle of a storm. I hope to God never to sail seas that rough again. I was as sick as a dog for weeks on end. I thought I was condemned to live on the ship forever, the journey took so long.'

A dash of sea-spray in my face pulled me back to reality.

'Nowadays, thanks to modern know-how,' I continued, 'a six-month journey from England to India can be accomplished in four weeks.'

A slight sneer seemed to caress the Doctor's lips.

'Modern know-how? You humans are all the same. Would it surprise you to learn that the first canal linking the Mediterranean to the Red Sea was dug over two thousand years ago? Not much more than a furrow in the sand, but they only had small ships in those days, not -' and he looked around him' - miracles of technology such as this. That canal lasted for eight hundred years before falling into disuse. Do you think this one will last anywhere near as long?'

He cocked his head on one side and looked up at me with a bright, sparrow-like gaze. I opened my mouth to stammer an answer, but he continued speaking.

'Pharaoh Necho started to re-dig the canal a century later. The Canal of the Pharaohs, they called it. A hundred thousand men died in the digging.

Perhaps they should have called it the Canal of the Dead. Necho was the son of old Psammitichus, you know? Lovely man: liked his drink, but then don't we all? Anyway, Darius took it over when Necho snuffed it, and my old friend Ptolemy took it over when Darius shuffled off this mortal coil. Or was taken upon the boat of the Night to join his ancestors, as I'm sure he would have liked to think of it. Ptolemy even built a lock in the canal: you probably thought that the English invented locks, didn't you?'

I shook my head, but the Doctor wasn't looking. He seemed to have got himself into a rut, and intended to keep talking until the subject was exhausted.

'Well, after about five hundred years the canal was impassable, and it wasn't until the Romans took over the country that anything more got done.

They liked straight roads, did the Romans. They must have loved the idea of a canal. Emperor Trajan restored it, but a hundred years later it had silted up again. When the Moslems conquered Egypt the Caliph Omar ordered the governor, a little rat-faced man by the name of Amr-ibn-al-Aas as I recall, to ream it out again. They called it the Canal of the Prince of the Faithful, and it lasted until the eighth century. That was a thousand years ago. Your version of the Suez Canal has been open for - what? twenty years? -and you think

you've given Mother Nature a bloody nose. What was it Shelley wrote?

"Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!" Nothing endures, Doctor Watson, nothing endures.'

He stopped abruptly. I felt chastened.

'Your historical knowledge is exceptional,' I said eventually.

'I pick things up, here and there.'

'There's usually a trip arranged across land to see Cairo and the pyramids.

You can pick up the ship again at Suez. Will you be signing up for it?'

He chuckled boyishly.

'I've had some nasty experiences around the