s though he never expected to find any taste in his daily bread,
as though he did not know anything about it. He fed himself like a
somnambulist. "It's an awful sight," thought Sterne; and he watched the
long period of mournful, silent immobility, with a big brown hand
lying loosely closed by the side of the plate, till he noticed the two
engineers to the right and left looking at him in astonishment. He would
close his mouth in a hurry then, and lowering his eyes, wink rapidly at
his plate. It was awful to see the old chap sitting there; it was even
awful to think that with three words he could blow him up sky-high.
All he had to do was to raise his voice and pronounce a single short
sentence, and yet that simple act seemed as impossible to attempt as
moving the sun out of its place in the sky. The old chap could eat in
his terrific mechanical way; but Sterne, from mental excitement, could
not--not that evening, at any rate.

He had had ample time since to get accustomed to the strain of the
meal-hours. He would never have believed it. But then use is everything;
only the very potency of his success prevented anything resembling
elation. He felt like a man who, in his legitimate search for a loaded
gun to help him on his way through the world, chances to come upon a
torpedo--upon a live torpedo with a shattering charge in its head and
a pressure of many atmospheres in its tail. It is the sort of weapon to
make its possessor careworn and nervous. He had no mind to be blown up
himself; and he could not get rid of the notion that the explosion was
bound to damage him too in some way.

This vague apprehension had restrained him at first. He was able now to
eat and sleep with that fearful weapon by his side, with the conviction
of its power always in mind. It had not been arrived at by any
reflective process; but once the idea had entered his head, the
conviction had followed overwhelmingly in a multitude of observed little
facts to which before he had given only a languid attention. The abrupt
and faltering intonations of the deep voice; the taciturnity put on
like an armor; the deliberate, as if guarded, movements; the long
immobilities, as if the man he watched had been afraid to disturb the
very air: every familiar gesture, every word uttered in his hearing,
every sigh overheard, had acquired a special significance, a
confirmatory import.

Every day that passed over the Sofala appeared to Sterne simply crammed
full w