of hearing the clink of
broken glass, nor of being struck by pieces of it; yet all the panes of
heavy plate which screened the forward end of the bridge--of a
thickness, one had supposed, to withstand anything likely to assail
them--were swept away as though they had been no more than the
rice-paper squares of a Japanese window.

[Illustration: WHERE THE GREAT LINER PLOWED ALONG]

[Illustration: WE HAD COLLIDED WITH THE "BRICK WALL"]

[Illustration: NOW SHE WAS BACK AT BASE]

The rush of water, of course, followed instantly upon the crash, yet, so
vivid are my impressions of the things intimately connected with the
blow itself that it seems as though there was an appreciable interval
between the fall of that and the time when the enveloping cataclysm
transformed the universe into a green-white stream of brine. From ahead,
above and from both sides the flood poured, to meet and mingle in a
whirling maelstrom in the middle of the bridge. There was nothing of
blown spindrift to it; it was green and solid and flowed with a heave
and a hurl that made no more of slamming a man to the deck than of
tossing a life-buoy. I went the whole length of the bridge when I lost
my grip on the port stanchion, brought up against the after-rail, and
then went down into a tangle of signal flags. I remember distinctly,
though, that the walls of water rushing by completely blotted out sea
and sky to port and starboard, and that there was all the darkness of
late twilight in the cavern of the engulfed bridge. Then the great sea
tumbled aft along the main deck, and it grew light again.

The captain and the helmsman had both kept their feet, and the latter,
dripping from head to heel, was just throwing over the engine-room
telegraph as I shook off my mantle of coloured bunting and crawled back
to my moorings at the stanchion. Immediately afterwards I saw him jump
on to the after-rail and make some sort of negative signal to a couple
of half-drowned boys who, waist-deep in swirling water, were pawing
desperately among the depth-charges. Then he came over and joined me for
a few moments.

"Some sea, that," he said, slipping down his hood and throwing back the
brine-dripping hair from his forehead. "It's happened before, but never
like that. Lord only knows what it's done to her. S'pose we'll begin to
hear of that in a minute." He pointed to a string of porcelain
insulators dangling at the end of twisted bits of wire in front of one
of the pa