aser in the engine-room of the _Trunella_.

Already, far above him, he could hear the rattle and shriek of
winch-engines and the far-off muffled roar of the whistle, rumbling its
triumph of returning life. Already the great propeller engines
themselves had been tested, after their weeks of idleness, languidly
stretching and moving like an awakening sleeper, slowly swinging their
solemn tons forward through their projected cycles and then as solemnly
back again.

About this vast pyramid-shaped machinery, galleried like a Latin
house-court, tremulous with the breath of life that sang and hissed
through its veins, the new greaser could see his fellow workers with
their dripping oil-cans, groping gallery by gallery up towards the
square of daylight that sifted down into the oil-scented pit where he
stood. He could see his pale-eyed friend, the fourth engineer, spanner
in hand, clinging to a moving network of steel like a spider to its
tremulous web--and in his breast, for the first time, a latent respect
for that youth awakened. He could see other greasers wriggling about
between intricate shafts and wheels, crawling cat-like along narrow
steel ledges, mounting steep metal ladders guarded by hot hand rails,
peering into oil boxes, "worrying" the vacuum pump, squatting and
kneeling about iron floors where oil-pits pooled and pump-valves
clacked and electric machines whirred and the antiphonal song of the
mounting steam roared like music in the ears of the listening Blake,
aching as he was for the first relieving throb of the screws. Stolidly
and calmly the men about him worked, threatened by flailing steel,
hissed at by venomously quiescent powers, beleaguered by mysteriously
moving shafts, surrounded by countless valves and an inexplicable
tangle of pipes, hemmed in by an incomprehensible labyrinth of copper
wires, menaced by the very shimmering joints and rods over which they
could run such carelessly affectionate fingers.

Blake could see the assistant engineers, with their eyes on the
pointers that stood out against two white dials. He could see the
Chief, the Chief whom he would so soon have to buy over and placate,
moving about nervous and alert. Then he heard the tinkle of the
telegraph bell, and the repeated gasp of energy as the engineers threw
the levers. He could hear the vicious hum of the reversing-engines,
and then the great muffled cough of power as the ponderous valve-gear
was thrown into position a