ld see the _Titanic_, in all her strength
and splendour, was solitary on the ocean. From the highest of her decks
nothing could be seen but sea and sky, a vast circle of floor and dome
of which, for all her speed of five-and-twenty miles an hour, she
remained always the centre. But it was only to the sense of sight that
she seemed thus solitary. The North Atlantic, waste of waters though it
appears, is really a country crossed and divided by countless tracks as
familiar to the seaman as though they were roads marked by trees and
milestones. Latitude and longitude, which to a landsman seem mere
mathematical abstractions, represent to seamen thousands and thousands
of definite points which, in their relation to sun and stars and the
measured lapse of time, are each as familiar and as accessible as any
spot on a main road is to a landsman. The officer on the bridge may see
nothing through his glasses but clouds and waves, yet in his mind's eye
he sees not only his own position on the map, which he could fix
accurately within a quarter of a mile, but the movements of dozens of
other ships coming or going along the great highways. Each ship takes
its own road, but it is a road that passes through a certain known
territory; the great liners all know each other's movements and where or
when they are likely to meet. Many of such meetings are invisible; it is
called a meeting at sea if ships pass twenty or thirty miles away from
each other and far out of sight.

For there are other senses besides that of sight which now pierce the
darkness and span the waste distances of the ocean. It is no voiceless
solitude through which the _Titanic_ goes on her way. It is full of
whispers, summonses, questions, narratives; full of information to the
listening ear. High up on the boat deck the little white house to which
the wires straggle down from the looped threads between the mastheads is
full of the voices of invisible ships that are coming and going beyond
the horizon. The wireless impulse is too delicate to be used to actuate
a needle like that of the ordinary telegraph; a little voice is given to
it, and with this it speaks to the operator who sits with the telephone
cap strapped over his ears; a whining, buzzing voice, speaking not in
words but in rhythms, corresponding to the dots and dashes made on
paper, out of which a whole alphabet has been evolved. And the wireless
is the greatest gossip in the world. It repeats everything it he