e. I believed it. At that moment,
on the threshold of new experiences, I took the words on trust. Perhaps,
for once, the things I had read in books had not eluded me! Perhaps the
old gentleman in the flannel nightgown really was a potential African
despot. In the midst of my reflections I heard another newspaper phrase,
'Not long ago the rivers ran blood.' This was the Second, who was fond
of stories inside comic supplements, and who was recalling a bygone
'atrocity,' I suppose. But it was curious to me, to notice how abruptly
they all dropped the journalist jargon the moment they spoke of
something they really understood. They regaled me with 'atrocities,'
with 'rivers running blood' and 'gold in the forests that no white man
had ever penetrated,' with 'power of life and death' and so on, but when
I inquired anxiously what this omnipotent monarch had come aboard of us
for, they replied without any hesitation,

"'To get a drink.'

"It seemed a contemptible diversion for a person inspiring such awe
politically. I don't say, mind you, that such _was_ his object. My
shipmates may have been as much in error about his motives as they were
about his power. I was too tired, too full of aches and humiliations of
my own, to investigate. He passed across my field of vision, and being
the first of his kind, left an ineffaceable impression. The sun went
down suddenly soon after, and the coppery glow vanished from the water,
leaving it a grey blur.

"'In the middle of all the atrocities'! The flashy, bombastic
phraseology came back to me with grim insistence that night when I went
down at eight o'clock to look after the boilers and pumps and to make,
with entirely inadequate means, those brass screws for the
dynamo-engine. The engine-room was in darkness save for the hand-lamp
that hung over the vice-bench. The fat cotton-wick smoked and crackled,
the light draught swirling it towards my head at times, singeing my hair
and making my eyes water. Behind me the silent, heated engines stood up,
stark and ominous like some emblem of my destiny watching me. The white
faces of the gauges over the starting handles stared blankly. From the
stokehold came the occasional clink of a shovel or the hollow clang of a
fire-door flung to. And I worked. I fought with the greasy brass and the
broken, worn-out tools. I made wasters and started again. The sweat
poured off me, and I drank thirstily the warm water in the can that
hung over my head in t