e of the
sea around the ship. The air, however, came up clammy and hot on his
face. A short hoot on which it would have been impossible to put any
sort of interpretation came from the bottom cavernously. This was the
way in which the second engineer answered his chief.

He was a middle-aged man with an inattentive manner, and apparently
wrapped up in such a taciturn concern for his engines that he seemed
to have lost the use of speech. When addressed directly his only answer
would be a grunt or a hoot, according to the distance. For all the years
he had been in the Sofala he had never been known to exchange as much
as a frank Good-morning with any of his shipmates. He did not seem aware
that men came and went in the world; he did not seem to see them at all.
Indeed he never recognized his ship mates on shore. At table (the four
white men of the Sofala messed together) he sat looking into his plate
dispassionately, but at the end of the meal would jump up and bolt down
below as if a sudden thought had impelled him to rush and see whether
somebody had not stolen the engines while he dined. In port at the end
of the trip he went ashore regularly, but no one knew where he spent
his evenings or in what manner. The local coasting fleet had preserved
a wild and incoherent tale of his infatuation for the wife of a sergeant
in an Irish infantry regiment. The regiment, however, had done its turn
of garrison duty there ages before, and was gone somewhere to the other
side of the earth, out of men's knowledge. Twice or perhaps three times
in the course of the year he would take too much to drink. On these
occasions he returned on board at an earlier hour than usual; ran
across the deck balancing himself with his spread arms like a tight-rope
walker; and locking the door of his cabin, he would converse and argue
with himself the livelong night in an amazing variety of tones; storm,
sneer, and whine with an inexhaustible persistence. Massy in his berth
next door, raising himself on his elbow, would discover that his second
had remembered the name of every white man that had passed through the
Sofala for years and years back. He remembered the names of men that had
died, that had gone home, that had gone to America: he remembered in his
cups the names of men whose connection with the ship had been so short
that Massy had almost forgotten its circumstances and could barely
recall their faces. The inebriated voice on the other side of th