"I am under orders to place myself entirely at your disposal," explained
her youthful and very stiffly starched skipper, Commander Poggi. "I am
to go where you desire and to stop as long as you please. Those are my
instructions."

Thus it came about that, shortly after noon on a scorching summer day,
we cast off our moorings and, leaving quarrel-torn Fiume abaft, turned
the nose of the _Sirio_ sou' by sou'-west, down the coast of Dalmatia.
The sun-kissed waters of the Bay of Quarnero looked for all the world
like a vast azure carpet strewn with a million sparkling diamonds; on
our starboard quarter stretched the green-clad slopes of Istria, with
the white villas of Abbazia peeping coyly out from amid the groves of
pine and laurel; to the eastward the bleak brown peaks of the Dinaric
Alps rose, savage, mysterious, forbidding, against the cloudless summer
sky. Perhaps no stretch of coast in all the world has had so varied and
romantic a history or so many masters as this Dalmatian seaboard. Since
the days of the tattooed barbarians who called themselves Illyrian, this
coast has been ruled in turn by Phœnicians, Celts, Macedonians, Greeks,
Romans, Goths, Byzantines, Croats, Serbs, Bulgars, Huns, Avars,
Saracens, Normans, Magyars, Genoese, Venetians, Tartars, Bosnians,
Turks, French, Russians, Montenegrins, British, Austrians, Italians--and
now by Americans, for from Cape Planca southward to Ragusa, a distance
of something over a hundred miles, the United States is the governing
power and an American admiral holds undisputed sway.

Leaning over the rail as we fled southward I lost myself in dreams of
far-off days. In my mind I could see, sweeping past in imaginary review,
those other vessels which, all down the ages, had skirted these same
shores: the purple sails of Phœnicia, Greek galleys bearing colonists
from Cnidus, Roman triremes with the slaves sweating at the oars,