"If you fall over in these you'll be drowned. They're lammies. I'll chock
you off with a pillow; but sleepin' in a torpedo-boat's what you might
call an acquired habit."
I coiled down on an iron-hard horse-hair pillow next the quivering steel
wall to acquire that habit. The sea, sliding over 267's skin, worried me
with importunate, half-caught confidences. It drummed tackily to gather my
attention, coughed, spat, cleared its throat, and, on the eve of that
portentous communication, retired up stage as a multitude whispering.
Anon, I caught the tramp of armies afoot, the hum of crowded cities
awaiting the event, the single sob of a woman, and dry roaring of wild
beasts. A dropped shovel clanging on the stokehold floor was, naturally
enough, the unbarring of arena gates; our sucking uplift across the crest
of some little swell, nothing less than the haling forth of new worlds;
our half-turning descent into the hollow of its mate, the abysmal plunge
of God-forgotten planets. Through all these phenomena and more--though I
ran with wild horses over illimitable plains of rustling grass; though I
crouched belly-flat under appalling fires of musketry; though I was
Livingstone, painless, and incurious in the grip of his lion--my shut eyes
saw the lamp swinging in its gimbals, the irregularly gliding patch of
light on the steel ladder, and every elastic shadow in the corners of the
frail angle-irons; while my body strove to accommodate itself to the
infernal vibration of the machine.
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