He pulled back the bolt:  the heavy iron plate turned on its hinges; and it was as though he had opened the door to the sounds of the tempest.  A gust of hoarse yelling met him:  the air was still; and the rushing of water overhead was covered by a tumult of strangled, throaty shrieks that produced an effect of desperate confusion.  He straddled his legs the whole width of the doorway and stretched his neck.  And at first he perceived only what he had come to seek:  six small yellow flames swinging violently on the great body of the dusk.

It was stayed like the gallery of a mine, with a row of stanchions in the middle, and cross-beams overhead, penetrating into the gloom ahead—­indefinitely.  And to port there loomed, like the caving in of one of the sides, a bulky mass with a slanting outline.  The whole place, with the shadows and the shapes, moved all the time.  The boatswain glared:  the ship lurched to starboard, and a great howl came from that mass that had the slant of fallen earth.

Pieces of wood whizzed past.  Planks, he thought, inexpressibly startled, and flinging back his head.  At his feet a man went sliding over, open-eyed, on his back, straining with uplifted arms for nothing:  and another came bounding like a detached stone with his head between his legs and his hands clenched.  His pigtail whipped in the air; he made a grab at the boatswain’s legs, and from his opened hand a bright white disc rolled against the boatswain’s foot.  He recognized a silver dollar, and yelled at it with astonishment.  With a precipitated sound of trampling and shuffling of bare feet, and with guttural cries, the mound of writhing bodies piled up to port detached itself from the ship’s side and sliding, inert and struggling, shifted to starboard, with a dull, brutal thump.  The cries ceased.  The boatswain heard a long moan through the roar and whistling of the wind; he saw an inextricable confusion of heads and shoulders, naked soles kicking upwards, fists raised, tumbling backs, legs, pigtails, faces.

“Good Lord!” he cried, horrified, and banged-to the iron door upon this vision.

This was what he had come on the bridge to tell.  He could not keep it to himself; and on board ship there is only one man to whom it is worth while to unburden yourself.  On his passage back the hands in the alleyway swore at him for a fool.  Why didn’t he bring that lamp?  What the devil did the coolies matter to anybody?  And when he came out, the extremity of the ship made what went on inside of her appear of little moment.

At first he thought he had left the alleyway in the very moment of her sinking.  The bridge ladders had been washed away, but an enormous sea filling the after-deck floated him up.  After that he had to lie on his stomach for some time, holding to a ring-bolt, getting his breath now and then, and swallowing salt water.  He struggled farther on his hands and knees, too frightened and distracted to turn back.  In this way he reached the after-part of the wheelhouse.  In that comparatively sheltered spot he found the second mate.