‘Thanks awfully,’ said Ken gratefully.  ’I say, how’s Gill?  He got knocked silly with the blast of the shell that sunk the “Swan.”  Is he hurt?’

‘He ain’t hit, anyway,’ said Williams.  ’He’s swallowed a bit more salt water than suits his innards, but he’ll pull round all right, never you fear.

‘Here, drink this down,’ he continued, handing Ken a thick mug full of some steaming mixture.  Ken swallowed it obediently.  It was thick Navy cocoa, laced with a dash of rum.

It sent a grateful warmth through every inch of Ken’s body, but its immediate effect was to make him so drowsy that his eyes began to close.

‘That’s all right,’ he heard Williams remark in a satisfied voice.  ’Forty winks won’t do you no manner of harm.’  The last thing Ken remembered was being wrapped in a blanket.  Then he dropped back on the mattress and almost before his head reached it was sound asleep.

He woke to the purr of engines and a warm thick atmosphere smelling strongly of oil and illuminated by white electric lamps.  For the moment he could not imagine where he was nor what had happened.  It was not until he rolled over and saw Roy lying stretched on another mattress beside him, and Gill a little beyond, that any sort of recollection came back to him.

He stretched himself.  He was sore all over, but otherwise fit enough and very hungry.  Then he sat up.

A burly figure came towards him, walking with that curiously light-footed tread which becomes second habit in a submarine.  It was Williams, the coxswain.

‘Well, young fellow me lad,’ he remarked genially, ‘how goes it?’

‘Top hole, thanks.  A bit empty.  That’s all.’

‘If that’s your only trouble, we’ll soon fix it.  Can you walk?’

‘You bet.’

‘Then come along forrard, and we’ll see what cooky can do for you.’

Cooky’s efforts consisted in biscuit, butter, sardines, jam, and lashings of hot strong tea, to all of which Ken did the fullest justice.

‘And how d’ye like life under the ocean wave?’ asked Williams, who was watching Ken’s progress with the eye of a connoisseur.

‘First time I ever tried it,’ said Ken, glancing round the long, narrow interior which seemed merely a packing case for a maze of intricate machinery.  ‘What is she?  What class I mean?’

’She’s G 2, sonny, and don’t you forget it.  The last word in submarine gadgets.  Twenty knots on the surface, and twelve submerged.  Carries eight o’ the biggest and best torpedoes, any one o’ which is warranted to knock the stuffing out o’ the “Goeben” or any other o’ Weeping Willy’s super-skulkers.’

‘Where are we now?’ inquired Ken with interest.

‘Couldn’t say precisely.  But somewheres about ten fathom below the shinin’ surface of the Dardanelles.’

Ken felt a queer thrill.  There was something uncanny in the thought that they were spinning along, sixty feet below the sea-level, cut off from all the living world.