He moved, climbing high up, disappearing low down, with a restless, purposeful industry, and when he stood still, holding the guard-rail in front of the starting-gear, he would keep glancing to the right at the steam-gauge, at the water-gauge, fixed upon the white wall in the light of a swaying lamp.  The mouths of two speaking-tubes gaped stupidly at his elbow, and the dial of the engine-room telegraph resembled a clock of large diameter, bearing on its face curt words instead of figures.  The grouped letters stood out heavily black, around the pivot-head of the indicator, emphatically symbolic of loud exclamations:  Ahead, astern, slow, Half, stand by; and the fat black hand pointed downwards to the word full, which, thus singled out, captured the eye as a sharp cry secures attention.

The wood-encased bulk of the low-pressure cylinder, frowning portly from above, emitted a faint wheeze at every thrust, and except for that low hiss the engines worked their steel limbs headlong or slow with a silent, determined smoothness.  And all this, the white walls, the moving steel, the floor plates under Solomon Rout’s feet, the floors of iron grating above his head, the dusk and the gleams, uprose and sank continuously, with one accord, upon the harsh wash of the waves against the ship’s side.  The whole loftiness of the place, booming hollow to the great voice of the wind, swayed at the top like a tree, would go over bodily, as if borne down this way and that by the tremendous blasts.

“You’ve got to hurry up,” shouted Mr. Rout, as soon as he saw Jukes appear in the stokehold doorway.

Jukes’ glance was wandering and tipsy; his red face was puffy, as though he had overslept himself.  He had had an arduous road, and had travelled over it with immense vivacity, the agitation of his mind corresponding to the exertions of his body.  He had rushed up out of the bunker, stumbling in the dark alleyway amongst a lot of bewildered men who, trod upon, asked “What’s up, sir?” in awed mutters all round him;—­down the stokehold ladder, missing many iron rungs in his hurry, down into a place deep as a well, black as Tophet, tipping over back and forth like a see-saw.  The water in the bilges thundered at each roll, and lumps of coal skipped to and fro, from end to end, rattling like an avalanche of pebbles on a slope of iron.

Somebody in there moaned with pain, and somebody else could be seen crouching over what seemed the prone body of a dead man; a lusty voice blasphemed; and the glow under each fire-door was like a pool of flaming blood radiating quietly in a velvety blackness.

A gust of wind struck upon the nape of Jukes’ neck and next moment he felt it streaming about his wet ankles.  The stokehold ventilators hummed:  in front of the six fire-doors two wild figures, stripped to the waist, staggered and stooped, wrestling with two shovels.

“Hallo!  Plenty of draught now,” yelled the second engineer at once, as though he had been all the time looking out for Jukes.  The donkeyman, a dapper little chap with a dazzling fair skin and a tiny, gingery moustache, worked in a sort of mute transport.  They were keeping a full head of steam, and a profound rumbling, as of an empty furniture van trotting over a bridge, made a sustained bass to all the other noises of the place.