Before the Port Said light grew on the horizon, our new shipboard community was well on its way to becoming an ephemeral village. In many ways, it was a duplicate of the society we had left behind: the aristocracy of First Class on the upper decks, the peasantry of enlisted men, clerks, and their families under our feet, with the true labouring classes either tidily concealed beneath P. & O. uniforms or else thoroughly hidden away in the bowels of the ship. Rigid social custom swayed not a millimetre in the dining rooms: One never spoke to a neighbour at table if one had not been introduced, and since there were few mutual acquaintances to proffer the necessary introductions, conversation was largely nonexistent. Holmes and I attended few of the dining room meals.

Other areas of the boat were less severely bound by the strictures of human intercourse. In the exercise room, for example, it proved difficult to maintain a dignified formality with the woman at the next stationary bicycle when both of you were sweating and panting and furiously going nowhere. And because of the limited population in our floating village, group events such as card games, mah-jongg, or table tennis tended to require a certain loosening of rules in order to maintain a pool of players, which broke the ice sufficiently to permit one to nod to one’s fellow player when one came upon him or her perambulating the deck the following morning.

However, as I used the ship’s gym rarely and played neither mah-jongg nor table tennis, I was permitted, in the brief periods of free time permitted me by my taskmaster, to remain firmly sheltered with my books. I had finished with the archaeology of Mohenjo-Daro and was sitting bundled on a sheltered deck chair with a translation of the massive and hugely complicated Hindu epic called The Mahabharata, when an unexpected voice intruded.

“So, what are you going as?”

I blinked up at the voice, which had come from a slim girl of perhaps seventeen who was dressed in an ever-so-slightly garish fur coat, a pleated skirt, a cloche hat over her bobbed hair, and a long beaded necklace. She was standing near the railing, trying to set alight the long cigarette she’d fitted into an even longer ivory holder; the wind was not giving her much joy with it.

“I beg your pardon?” I asked. I couldn’t think what she was talking about, nor did I think we had met.