two o'clock
in the morning
It was a splendid night for our purpose ; there was a breathless calm , the water was smooth as oil , and although there was certainly a moon , she was in her last quarter , and did not rise until close upon one o'clock in the morning . Moreover , the sky was overcast by a great sheet of dappled cloud through which only a solitary star here and there peeped faintly ; it was consequently dark enough to afford us a reasonable chance of getting within striking distance of our quarry undetected . When the Russians sent their ships out of harbour to lie all night in the roadstead , as they did pretty frequently now , it was their custom to get them out early in the afternoon , after their destroyers had carefully swept the anchorage in search of mines ; and it was my hope that -- we having left them alone for the preceding two days -- they would by this time be getting suspicious of such unwonted inactivity on our part , and consequently would send out one , or perhaps even two ships , to guard against a possible _ coup _ on our part . Our mine-laying craft very rarely got to work before one or two o'clock in the morning , that being the hour when human vigilance is popularly supposed to be least active ; I therefore planned to arrive in the roadstead about midnight , hoping that I should then catch the enemy off his guard , snatching a rest in preparation for the moment when our activities usually began . Now , the thing which we had most to fear was a long-distance searchlight established in a station on Golden Hill , at a height of some two hundred feet above the sea-level . This searchlight was generally turned on at dusk , and was kept unceasingly playing upon the anchorage and its adjacent waters all through the night . It commanded the entire roadstead , from a point three miles east of the harbour 's mouth , right round to the south and west as far as the Pinnacle Rock ; and the difficulty was how to avoid being picked up by it before we had delivered our attack .