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the Cocos & she suddenly turned and made a "bee line at full speed for the islands. Well of course there was a fight, & a good one, (we were miles away over the horizon by this time) at the end of which the Emden came off worst & got smashed up & the crew were captured. The Emden put up a rattling good fight but the Sydney had advantage of her both with speed, & guns. The Sydney lost 2 men & thirteen wounded & the Emden lost a terrible amount of lives. Of course you've heard all of this by now. Well we are living on very spare & short rations now being on active service, & the fact is, we might possibly have a scrap with the Turks here before long. Although the Khedive has cleared out from here, the place is alive with Turks. We have'nt started to ride our horses yet, we've only been here a few days & they have to recover from the voyage. We only lost 12 altogether.
The Tas. Light Horse are here. I've seen Duncan Macdonald & Rex O'Kelly whom I do like. Keith Eltham & others are over at the pyrimids. Cairo is a beautiful place, & the Nile etc, I wish you could see it. There's no doubt about it, I've seen some wonderful places already, we never went into Colombo, Aden, or Suez wharves, but we saw a good bit of them. I was on guard day & night going through the Suez Canal & saw everything. It takes 17 hours to go through, at 8 knots an hour sometimes. But when we came to Port Said, at the other end, it was indeed a wonderful sight. We stayed there 2 days moored off the wharves, or docks, just about 50 yards from them, so we could see the life on shore & in the river as well.