there, from side to side, in a
whirl of smashed wood, torn clothing, rolling dollars. A struggle once
started, they would be unable to stop themselves. Nothing could stop
them now except main force. It was a disaster. He had seen it, and that
was all he could say. Some of them must be dead, he believed. The rest
would go on fighting. . . .

He sent up his words, tripping over each other, crowding the narrow
tube. They mounted as if into a silence of an enlightened comprehension
dwelling alone up there with a storm. And Jukes wanted to be dismissed
from the face of that odious trouble intruding on the great need of the
ship.

V

He waited. Before his eyes the engines turned with slow labour, that in
the moment of going off into a mad fling would stop dead at Mr. Rout's
shout, "Look out, Beale!" They paused in an intelligent immobility,
stilled in mid-stroke, a heavy crank arrested on the cant, as if
conscious of danger and the passage of time. Then, with a "Now, then!"
from the chief, and the sound of a breath expelled through clenched
teeth, they would accomplish the interrupted revolution and begin
another.

There was the prudent sagacity of wisdom and the deliberation of
enormous strength in their movements. This was their work--this patient
coaxing of a distracted ship over the fury of the waves and into the
very eye of the wind. At times Mr. Rout's chin would sink on his breast,
and he watched them with knitted eyebrows as if lost in thought.

The voice that kept the hurricane out of Jukes' ear began: "Take the
hands with you . . . ," and left off unexpectedly.

"What could I do with them, sir?"

A harsh, abrupt, imperious clang exploded suddenly. The three pairs of
eyes flew up to the telegraph dial to see the hand jump from FULL
to STOP, as if snatched by a devil. And then these three men in the
engineroom had the intimate sensation of a check upon the ship, of a
strange shrinking, as if she had gathered herself for a desperate leap.

"Stop her!" bellowed Mr. Rout.

Nobody--not even Captain MacWhirr, who alone on deck had caught sight of
a white line of foam coming on at such a height that he couldn't believe
his eyes--nobody was to know the steepness of that sea and the awful
depth of the hollow the hurricane had scooped out behind the running
wall of water.

It raced to meet the ship, and, with a pause, as of girding the loins,
the Nan-Shan lifted her bows and leaped. The flames in all the lamp