he
lazarette of course. Where we had our breakfast that morning he saw only
a great hole in the floor. This appeared to him so awfully mysterious,
and impressed him so immensely, that what he saw and heard after he got
on deck were mere trifles in comparison. And, mark, he noticed directly
the wheel deserted and his barque off her course--and his only thought
was to get that miserable, stripped, undecked, smouldering shell of
a ship back again with her head pointing at her port of destination.
Bankok! That's what he was after. I tell you this quiet, bowed,
bandy-legged, almost deformed little man was immense in the singleness
of his idea and in his placid ignorance of our agitation. He motioned us
forward with a commanding gesture, and went to take the wheel himself.

"Yes; that was the first thing we did--trim the yards of that wreck! No
one was killed, or even disabled, but everyone was more or less hurt.
You should have seen them! Some were in rags, with black faces, like
coal-heavers, like sweeps, and had bullet heads that seemed closely
cropped, but were in fact singed to the skin. Others, of the watch
below, awakened by being shot out from their collapsing bunks, shivered
incessantly, and kept on groaning even as we went about our work. But
they all worked. That crew of Liverpool hard cases had in them the right
stuff. It's my experience they always have. It is the sea that gives
it--the vastness, the loneliness surrounding their dark stolid souls.
Ah! Well! we stumbled, we crept, we fell, we barked our shins on the
wreckage, we hauled. The masts stood, but we did not know how much they
might be charred down below. It was nearly calm, but a long swell ran
from the west and made her roll. They might go at any moment. We looked
at them with apprehension. One could not foresee which way they would
fall.

"Then we retreated aft and looked about us. The deck was a tangle of
planks on edge, of planks on end, of splinters, of ruined woodwork. The
masts rose from that chaos like big trees above a matted undergrowth.
The interstices of that mass of wreckage were full of something whitish,
sluggish, stirring--of something that was like a greasy fog. The
smoke of the invisible fire was coming up again, was trailing, like a
poisonous thick mist in some valley choked with dead wood. Already lazy
wisps were beginning to curl upwards amongst the mass of splinters. Here
and there a piece of timber, stuck upright, resembled a pos