el of shouts and cries,
and the deafening noise of steel, scraping and crashing over ice,
Rowland heard the agonized voice of a woman crying from the bridge
steps: "Myra--Myra, where are you? Come back."

CHAPTER VII

Seventy-five thousand tons--dead-weight--rushing through the fog at the
rate of fifty feet a second, had hurled itself at an iceberg. Had the
impact been received by a perpendicular wall, the elastic resistance of
bending plates and frames would have overcome the momentum with no more
damage to the passengers than a severe shaking up, and to the ship than
the crushing in of her bows and the killing, to a man, of the watch
below. She would have backed off, and, slightly down by the head,
finished the voyage at reduced speed, to rebuild on insurance money, and
benefit, largely, in the end, by the consequent advertising of her
indestructibility. But a low beach, possibly formed by the recent
overturning of the berg, received the _Titan_, and with her keel cutting
the ice like the steel runner of an ice-boat, and her great weight
resting on the starboard bilge, she rose out of the sea, higher and
higher--until the propellers in the stern were half exposed--then,
meeting an easy, spiral rise in the ice under her port bow, she heeled,
overbalanced, and crashed down on her side, to starboard.

The holding-down bolts of twelve boilers and three triple-expansion
engines, unintended to hold such weights from a perpendicular flooring,
snapped, and down through a maze of ladders, gratings, and fore-and-aft
bulkheads came these giant masses of steel and iron, puncturing the
sides of the ship, even where backed by solid, resisting ice; and
filling the engine- and boiler-rooms with scalding steam, which brought
a quick, though tortured death, to each of the hundred men on duty in
the engineer's department.

Amid the roar of escaping steam, and the bee-like buzzing of nearly
three thousand human voices, raised in agonized screams and callings
from within the inclosing walls, and the whistling of air through
hundreds of open deadlights as the water, entering the holes of the
crushed and riven starboard side, expelled it, the _Titan_ moved slowly
backward and launched herself into the sea, where she floated low on her
side--a dying monster, groaning with her death-wound.

A solid, pyramid-like hummock of ice, left to starboard as the steamer
ascended, and which projected close alongside the upper, or boat-deck,
as s