March 4. All day with Murad's men setting wire entanglements
under water; two Turkish destroyers patrolling the entrance to the
bay, and cavalry patrols on the heights to warn away the curious.
March 6. Forts Alamout and Shah Abbas are being reconstructed
from the new plans. Wired areas under water and along the coves
and shoals are being plotted. Murad Bey is unusually polite and
effusive, conversing with me in German and French. A spidery man
and very dangerous.
March 7. A strange and tragic affair last night. The heat being
severe, I left my tent about midnight and went down to the dock
where my little sailboat lay, with the object of cooling myself on
the water. There was a hot land breeze; I sailed out into the bay
and cruised north along the coves which I have wired. As I rounded
a little rocky point I was surprised to see in the moonlight, very
near, a steam yacht at anchor, carrying no lights. The longer I
looked at her the more certain I became that I was gazing at the
Imperial yacht. I had no idea what the yacht might be doing here;
I ran my sailboat close under the overhanging rocks and anchored.
Then I saw a small boat in the moonlight, pulling from the yacht
toward shore, where the crescent cove had already been thoroughly
staked and the bottom closely covered with barbed wire as far as
the edge of the deep channel which curves in here like a
scimitar.
It must have been that the people in the boat miscalculated the
location of the channel, for they were well over the sunken barbed
wire when they lifted and threw overboard what they had come there
to get rid of--two dark bulks that splashed.
I watched the boat pull back to the Imperial yacht. A little later
the yacht weighed anchor and steamed northward, burning no lights.
Only the red reflection tingeing the smoke from her stacks was
visible. I watched her until she was lost in the moonlight,
thinking all the while of those weighted sacks so often dropped
overboard along the Bosporus and off Seraglio Point from that same
Imperial yacht.
When the steamer had disappeared, I got out my sweeps and rowed
for the place where the dark objects had been dropped overboard. I
knew that they must be resting somewhere on the closely
criss-crossed mesh of wires just below the surface of the water;
but I probed for an hour before I located anything. Another hour
passed in trying to hook into the object with the little
three-fluked grapnel which I used as an anchor. I got hold of
something finally; a heavy chest of olive wood bound with metal;
but I had to rig a tackle before I could hoist it aboard.