ge diameter, bearing on its face curt words instead of figures. The
grouped letters stood out heavily black, around the pivot-head of the
indicator, emphatically symbolic of loud exclamations: AHEAD, ASTERN,
SLOW, Half, STAND BY; and the fat black hand pointed downwards to the
word FULL, which, thus singled out, captured the eye as a sharp cry
secures attention.

The wood-encased bulk of the low-pressure cylinder, frowning portly from
above, emitted a faint wheeze at every thrust, and except for that
low hiss the engines worked their steel limbs headlong or slow with a
silent, determined smoothness. And all this, the white walls, the moving
steel, the floor plates under Solomon Rout's feet, the floors of
iron grating above his head, the dusk and the gleams, uprose and sank
continuously, with one accord, upon the harsh wash of the waves against
the ship's side. The whole loftiness of the place, booming hollow to the
great voice of the wind, swayed at the top like a tree, would go over
bodily, as if borne down this way and that by the tremendous blasts.

"You've got to hurry up," shouted Mr. Rout, as soon as he saw Jukes
appear in the stokehold doorway.

Jukes' glance was wandering and tipsy; his red face was puffy, as though
he had overslept himself. He had had an arduous road, and had travelled
over it with immense vivacity, the agitation of his mind corresponding
to the exertions of his body. He had rushed up out of the bunker,
stumbling in the dark alleyway amongst a lot of bewildered men who, trod
upon, asked "What's up, sir?" in awed mutters all round him;--down the
stokehold ladder, missing many iron rungs in his hurry, down into a
place deep as a well, black as Tophet, tipping over back and forth like
a see-saw. The water in the bilges thundered at each roll, and lumps of
coal skipped to and fro, from end to end, rattling like an avalanche of
pebbles on a slope of iron.

Somebody in there moaned with pain, and somebody else could be seen
crouching over what seemed the prone body of a dead man; a lusty voice
blasphemed; and the glow under each fire-door was like a pool of flaming
blood radiating quietly in a velvety blackness.

A gust of wind struck upon the nape of Jukes' neck and next moment
he felt it streaming about his wet ankles. The stokehold ventilators
hummed: in front of the six fire-doors two wild figures, stripped to the
waist, staggered and stooped, wrestling with two shovels.

"Hallo! Plenty of