A Hero for Leanda

the two smiling Negroes from the boat yard cast off the fines, which he coiled in a leisurely fashion as Thalia blew gently away from the shore. Then he hoisted the big red mainsail and they bore away toward Kilindini.
    They sailed down past the docks, where cars and cement and agricultural machinery were being unloaded from huge ships onto scorching wharves. They sailed along the edge of mangrove swamps, where the low glaucous trees threw out branches that curved down into the mud like flying buttresses. They turned and sailed almost to the reef, with its piled-up masses of blue-green water and its crests of foam. They sailed past a pink cliff-like pile known as Fort Jesus , and right through the old harbor, where Arab dhows with great triangular sails and wonderfully carved stems and stems were unloading Persian rugs and Mangalore tiles, and naked Negroes with splendid torsos were fishing with nets, waist-deep in crystal water at the edges of the creek.
    The trials lasted for three hours. In that time Conway tested Thalia on every point of sailing, experimenting constantly with the sheets and the tiller, seeing how she lay hove-to, judging her speed on a reach, beating out across the south of the lagoon in an exhilarating cloud of spray and seeing how she came about in the swell, first on one tack and then on the other, and how she took the seas as they came up under her stem. Sometimes he told Leanda what he was doing; once he asked her if she felt seasick, and she said no. Most of the time he was silent, and she asked no questions. When he had finished with the sails he started the engine and they cruised up and down for another hour, testing Thalia s speed under power and getting a rough idea of the fuel consumption. But the engine was noisy, and Conway switched it off in the end with relief. “Horrible things!” he said.
    It was after five when they tied up, and a clammy sea mist was beginning to creep in, making the air seem chill. Even then, Conway hadn’t finished. With Leanda’s help, he put the pram dinghy in the water and they went for a short row round the anchorage. The dinghy, with two people in it, had very little freeboard, but it would be safe enough in smooth water.
    As they rowed back to Thalia, Leanda couldn’t restrain herself any longer.
    “Won’t you stop being a sphinx now,” she said, “and tell me whether she’ll do?”
    “Oh, yes,” Conway said, “she’ll do.”
    “You mean you’ll take her to Heureuse?”
    “I’ll never have a better chance of getting a boat like this of my own.”
    “And what about me?” she asked anxiously. “You can’t say I got in the way. Will I do?”
    “The thing is,” he said, in his old bantering tone, “would you be a congenial companion?”
    “Mike, please!”
    He looked at her eager face. “I reckon you’ll do,” he said. “We’ll go and tell Ionides the trip’s on.”

    The agent was scarcely less delighted than Leanda over Conway ’s decision. That evening he arranged for the dispatch of a coded message to Metaxas telling him the news. Afterward he raised the crucially important question of where Kastella would be put ashore, supposing the expedition were successful. The harbor at Mombasa , he said, though comparatively easy to find and enter, was under too close supervision to make it suitable for a secret landing from a yacht—and Conway agreed. A much better place, Ionides thought, was a small town called Malindi, some forty miles up the coast to the north. It was a holiday resort, popular on weekends because there was a wide gap in the reef there and the surf bathing was good, but almost deserted on weekdays. Ionides himself had a holiday shack just outside the town, which might be very useful. He suggested that Conway and Leanda should go with him next day to do a bit of reconnoitering.
    First thing in the morning, therefore, they set off northward in the Cadillac. There was a fair amount of traffic on the route, but between the road and the sea the flat coastal belt seemed sparsely populated. There were one or two attractive coastal villages—groups of square, palm-thatched houses built of coconut poles plastered with coral mud, where innumerable small children played in the sand and girls, naked to the waist and wearing moplike kilts of grass around their hips, tilled small cassava plots and patches of sweet corn. Otherwise there was little to be seen but the featureless maze of the palm trees that rattled their