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Whilst Ashby wended his way across Sri Lanka, the Emden continued to menace commercial shipping around the island and throughout the Indian Ocean. Now, for the second time, he was searching for a way home. We get a sense of his anxiety from a letter to Evelyn Shaw in which he charts multiple routes back to Rome. He hopes to be:

back in Rome on Nov. 1, unless I am forcibly prevented and shall probably go overland to Bombay and take the P&O mail ship leaving there on 17th and due at Port Said Oct. 26 and Marseilles Oct. 30 … If the trains are running … I may take a boat to Italy…The Marseille call is not quite certain … The Brindisi service is apparently 'off' … it all depends how things are in France of course.

Nine days later he caught a lifeline. We know this from Balfour, who describes transhipping to the SS Majola and 'joining Ashby and a few other B[ritish] A[ssociation]s [who were] also on board having come to Colombo [earlier] on the Malawa or Morea.' On 7 October, when the Majola slipped out of Port Colombo and set off for Mumbai (Bombay), the Emden was still at large. For this reason, Balfour describes the ship as being 'pitch-dark at night [with] only a few masked lights in the saloons'. As before, they proceeded in darkness and radio silence. 
A week later, as the Majola was approaching the Gulf of Aden, Ashby quietly celebrated his 40th birthday (14 October 1914). That day, when the Hadhramut coastline of Yemen came into view, Balfour wrote about how 'the passengers were treated to a remarkable sight of a large school of dolphins in the afternoon, playing and leaping great heights into the air'. It was a brief respite from war tensions before they reached the next port of call – Malta.

Correspondence: Thomas Ashby, letter to Evelyn Shaw, 28 September 1914. BSR Administrative Archive, Box 51.
Diary: Henry Balfour, 3rd of a 3 notebook diary from Australia. 1914. BAAS, Pitt Rivers Museum.