ps that hasn't. I've been through it and I know. It's the rich
man does it."

"Well," said Raft, "I don't even remember seeing one."

"Haven't you ever been in no cities?"

"I've been in cities right enough, but most by the water-side."

"Well, you've seen chaps in plug hats and chaps drivin' in carriages,
that's the sort that keeps us down, that's the sort we've got to make
an end of."

Raft did not quite see. He had a respect for Harbutt mixed with a
contempt for him as a sailor. Harbutt knew a lot--but he could not see
how the chaps in plug hats kept other people down; the few he had seen
had always seemed to him away and beyond his world, soft folk, and
always busy about their own affairs--and how were they to be made an end
of?

"Do you mean killing them?" he asked.

"Oh, there's other ways than killin'," replied Harbutt. "It's not them,
it's their money does the trick."

He finished his patch and turned in. Raft finished his pipe and turned
in also and the fo'c'sle was given over to the noises of the sea and the
straining timbers of the ship.

Now that the figures of the two sailors had vanished its personality
took fuller life, grim, dark, close, like the interior of a grimy hand
clutching the lives of all those sleepers. The beams shewed like the
curved fingers, and the heel of the bowsprit like the point of the
in-turned thumb, a faint soul-killing rock of kerosene filled it,
intensifying, after the fashion of ambergris, all the other perfumes,
without losing in power. Bilge, tobacco and humanity, you cannot know
what these things are till they are married with the reek of kerosene,
with the grunts and snores of weary men, with lamplight dimmed with
smoke haze; with the heave and fall of the sea; the groaning of timbers
and the boom of the waves. This is the fo'c'sle whose great, great,
great grandmother was the lower deck of the trireme where slaves chained
to benches laboured till they died, just as they labour to-day.

CHAPTER II

NORTH-WEST

The _Albatross_, bound from Cape Town to Melbourne, had been blown out
of her course and south of the Crozet Islands; she was now steering
north-west, making towards Kerguelen, across an ice-blue sea, vast, like
a country of broken crystal strewn with snow. The sky, against which the
top-gallant stay-sails shewed gull-white in the sun, had the cold blue
of the sea and was hung round at the horizon by clouds like the white
clouds that hang round t