ou want to see the coach locked you'd better go aboard. It's due
now," says Mr. Geary. I enter through the door amidships. There is
nothing here for display. The inner skin of the gas-tanks comes down to
within a foot or two of my head and turns over just short of the turn of
the bilges. Liners and yachts disguise their tanks with decoration,
but the G.P.O. serves them raw under a lick of grey official paint. The
inner skin shuts off fifty feet of the bow and as much of the stern,
but the bow-bulkhead is recessed for the lift-shunting apparatus as
the stern is pierced for the shaft-tunnels. The engine-room lies almost
amidships. Forward of it, extending to the turn of the bow tanks, is an
aperture--a bottomless hatch at present--into which our coach will
be locked. One looks down over the coamings three hundred feet to
the despatching-caisson whence voices boom upward. The light below is
obscured to a sound of thunder, as our coach rises on its guides. It
enlarges rapidly from a postage-stamp to a playing-card; to a punt and
last a pontoon. The two clerks, its crew, do not even look up as it
comes into place. The Quebec letters fly under their fingers and leap
into the docketed racks, while both captains and Mr. Geary satisfy them
selves that the coach is locked home. A clerk passes the way-bill over
the hatch coaming. Captain Purnall thumb-marks and passes it to Mr.
Geary. Receipt has been given and taken. "Pleasant run," says Mr. Geary,
and disappears through the door which a foot high pneumatic compressor
locks after him.

"A-ah!" sighs the compressor released. Our holding-down clips part with
a tang. We are clear.

Captain Hodgson opens the great colloid underbody porthole through which
I watch over-lighted London slide eastward as the gale gets hold of
us. The first of the low winter clouds cuts off the well-known view and
darkens Middlesex. On the south edge of it I can see a postal packet's
light ploughing through the white fleece. For an instant she gleams like
a star ere she drops toward the Highgate Receiving Towers. "The Bombay
Mail," says Captain Hodgson, and looks at his watch. "She's forty
minutes late."

"What's our level?" I ask.

"Four thousand. Aren't you coming up on the bridge?"

The bridge (let us ever praise the G.P.O. as a repository of ancientest
tradition!) is represented by a view of Captain Hodgson's legs where he
stands on the Control Platform that runs thwart-ships overhead. The bow
co