‘Awful sea,’ said the Captain’s voice from above.

‘Don’t let me drive her under,’ barked Solomon Rout up the pipe.

‘Dark and rain. Can’t see what’s coming,’ uttered the voice. ‘Must—keep—her—moving—enough to steer—and chance it,’ it went on to state distinctly.

‘I am doing as much as I dare.’

‘We are—getting—smashed up—a good deal up here,’ proceeded the voice mildly. ‘Doing—fairly well—though. Of course, if the wheelhouse should go…’

Mr Rout, bending an attentive ear, muttered peevishly something under his breath.

But the deliberate voice up there became animated to ask: ‘Jukes turned up yet?’ Then, after a short wait, ‘I wish he would bear a hand. I want him to be done and come up here in case of anything. To look after the ship. I am all alone. The second mate’s lost…’

‘What?’ shouted Mr Rout into the engine-room, taking his head away. Then up the tube he cried, ‘Gone overboard?’ and clapped his ear to.

‘Lost his nerve,’ the voice from above continued in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘Damned awkward circumstance.’

Mr Rout, listening with bowed neck, opened his eyes wide at this. However, he heard something like the sounds of a scuffle and broken exclamations coming down to him. He strained his hearing; and all the time Beale, the third engineer, with his arms uplifted, held between the palms of his hands the rim of a little black wheel projecting at the side of a big copper pipe. He seemed to be poising it above his head, as though it were a correct attitude in some sort of game.

To steady himself, he pressed his shoulder against the white bulkhead, one knee bent, and a sweat-rag tucked in his belt hanging on his hip. His smooth cheek was begrimed and flushed, and the coal dust on his eyelids, like the black pencilling of a make-up, enhanced the liquid brilliance of the whites, giving to his youthful face something of a feminine, exotic and fascinating aspect. When the ship pitched he would with hasty movements of his hands screw hard at the little wheel.

‘Gone crazy,’ began the Captain’s voice suddenly in the tube. ‘Rushed at me… Just now. Had to knock him down… This minute. You heard, Mr Rout?’

‘The devil!’ muttered Mr Rout. ‘Look out, Beale!’

His shout rang out like the blast of a warning trumpet, between the iron walls of the engine-room. Painted white, they rose high into the dusk of the skylight, sloping like a roof; and the whole lofty space resembled the interior of a monument, divided by floors of iron grating, with lights flickering at different levels, and a mass of gloom lingering in the middle, within the columnar stir of machinery under the motionless swelling of the cylinders. A loud and wild resonance, made up of all the noises of the hurricane, dwelt in the still warmth of the air. There was in it the smell of hot metal, of oil, and a slight mist of steam. The blows of the sea seemed to traverse it in an unringing, stunning shock, from side to side.

Gleams, like pale long flames, trembled upon the polish of metal; from the flooring below the enormous crank-heads emerged in their turns with a flash of brass and steel—going over; while the connecting- rods, big-jointed, like skeleton limbs, seemed to thrust them down and pull them up again with an irresistible precision. And deep in the half-light other rods dodged deliberately to and fro, crossheads nodded, discs of metal rubbed smoothly against each other, slow and gentle, in a commingling of shadows and gleams.

Sometimes all those powerful and unerring movements would slow down simultaneously, as if they had been the functions of a living organism, stricken suddenly by the blight of languor; and Mr Rout’s eyes