Where is Robin?

Another minor mystery. No, actually it is major. Where is Robin?

Robin?

Are you there?

On a lighter note, I can't believe I went on the record on Jan. 25th complaining about Patrick O'Brian using too many nautical terms. It's Feb. 25th and I am 3/4 of the way through the second of the 18 books and am so happy, dizzy with delight, that I have this fictional realm to dwell in for 16.25 more books. There are so many good things to say about POB as a writer that I hardly know where to start. But perhaps with his extreme compression. He never explains anything twice. Sometimes he hardly explains it once. It is almost cinematic, without ever being cheesy. Consider this passage, a complete summary of Dr. Stephen Maturin's travels (presumably several weeks or more) as a spy in Spain:

Tides, tides, the Cove of Cork, the embarkation waiting on the moon, a tall swift-pacing mule in the bare torrid mountains quivering in the sun, palmetto-scrub, Senor don Estevan Maturin y Domanova kisses the feet of the very reverend Lord Abbot of Montserrat and begs the honor of an audience. The endless white road winding, the inhuman landscape of Aragon, cruel sun and weariness, dust, weariness to the heart and soul. What was independence but a word? What did any form of government matter? Freedom: to do what? Disgust, so strong that he leant against the saddle, hardly able to bring himself to mount. A shower on the Madadetta, and everywhere the scent of thyme: eagles wheeling under thunderclouds, rising, rising. 'My mind is too confused for anything but direct action,' he said. 'The flight disguised as an advance.'
The lonely beach, lanterns flashing from the offing, an infinity of sea. Ireland again, with such memories at every turn. 'If I could throw off some of this burden of memory, ' said Stephen to his second glass of laudanum, 'I should be more nearly sane. Here's to you, Villiers, my dear.' The Holyhead mail and two hundred seventy miles of rattling jerking, falling asleep, and waking in another county: rain, rain, rain: Welsh voices in the night. London and his report, trying to disentangle the strands of altruism, silliness, mere enthusiam. self-seeking, love of violence, personal resentment; trying to give the impossible plain answer to the question 'Is Spain going to join France against us, and if so, when?' Amd there he was in Deal once more, sitting alone in the snug of the Rose and Crown, watching the shipping in the Downs and drinking a cup of tea: he had an odd detachment from all this familiar scene -- the uniforms that passed outside his bow-window were intimately well known, but it was as though they belonged to another world, a world at one or two removes, as though their inhabitants, walking, laughing, and talking out there on the other side of the pane were mute, devoid of color and real substance.