"Good-morning, Mrs. Belgrave; good-morning, Louis; I hope you have both slept well," said the captain, saluting them.
"I have slept like a rock all night long," replied the lady.
"I have fallen into sailors' ways, so that I go to sleep whenever I lie down," added Louis. "I could sleep my four hours on board of the Maud, and wake at the right time without being called. But where are we now, sir?"
"You see the lighthouse ahead; that is in latitude 25°. We are now nearly as far south as the first cataract on the Nile, as far south as we went in Africa."
"I can understand that better than simple figures," said Mrs. Belgrave.
"But we went a little farther south than that off Cuba," suggested Louis.
"We shall cross the Tropic of Cancer while we are at luncheon," added the commander. "You learned at school that this boundary was at twenty-three and a half degrees north of the equator, and it is generally so stated, though it is not quite accurate."
"I wish you would explain this at the next conference, Captain Ringgold, for what you say is a surprise to me," said Louis.
"I will do it in a general way, though I am not an astronomer in the scientific sense of the word," answered the captain. "We are approaching the Dædalus lightship. I suppose you remember the name."
"I know that Dædalus was a very ingenious artist of Athens, who planned the Cretan labyrinth, invented carpentry and some of the tools used in the trade; but I don't know why his name was given to this lighthouse."
"I cannot inform you why it is so called, if there was any reason for doing so; very likely it was given to it for no reason at all, as some of the ships in the British navy are supplied with classical names for the mere sound of the words, as Agamemnon, Achilles, though with some reference to the trade of the originals in war."
"Why is it placed here all alone in the middle of this sea?" asked Louis, who had looked about it for any signs of rocks.
"It is built on a dangerous reef which is never above water, though some small round black rocks are seen at low tide awash. They look like the kettles in which cooks get up a boiled dinner; and for this reason the Arabs call the reef Abu Kizan, which means the 'father of pots.' As you perceive, the ship is now out of sight of land; for the Red Sea is a hundred and twenty miles wide at this point. But there is the gong for breakfast, and we must attend to that."