For, transfiguring Abel Reeling’s form as a prophet’s form is transfigured in the instant of his rapture, flooding his brain with the white eureka-light of perfect knowledge, that for which he and his dream had been at a standstill had come.  He knew her, this ship of the future, as if God’s Finger had bitten her lines into his brain.  He knew her as those already sinking into the grave know things, miraculously, completely, accepting Life’s impossibilities with a nodded “Of course.”  From the ardent mouths of her eight furnaces to the last drip from her lubricators, from her bed-plates to the breeches of her quick-firers, he knew her—­read her gauges, thumbed her bearings, gave the ranges from her range-finders, and lived the life he lived who was in command of her.  And he would not forget on the morrow, as he had forgotten on many morrows, for at last he had seen the water about his feet, and knew that there would be no morrow for him in this world....

And even in that moment, with but a sand or two to run in his glass, indomitable, insatiable, dreaming dream on dream, he could not die until he knew more.  He had two questions to ask, and a master-question; and but a moment remained.  Sharply his voice rang out.

“Ho, there!...  This ancient ship, the Mary of the Tower, cannot steam thirty and a quarter knots, but yet she can sail the waters.  What more does your ship?  Can she soar above them, as the fowls of the air soar?”

“Lord, he thinks we’re an aeroplane!...  No, she can’t....”

“And can you dive, even as the fishes of the deep?”

“No....  Those are submarines ... we aren’t a submarine....”

But Abel Keeling waited for no more.  He gave an exulting chuckle.

“Oho, oho—­thirty knots, and but on the face of the waters—­no more than that?  Oho!...  Now my ship, the ship I see as a mother sees full-grown the child she has but conceived—­my ship, I say—­oho!—­my ship shall....  Below there—­trip that gun!”

The cry came suddenly and alertly, as a muffled sound came from below and an ominous tremor shook the galleon.

“By Jove, her guns are breaking loose below—­that’s her finish—­”

“Trip that gun, and double-breech the others!” Abel Keeling’s voice rang out, as if there had been any to obey him.  He had braced himself within the belfry frame; and then in the middle of the next order his voice suddenly failed him.  His ship-shape, that for the moment he had forgotten, rode once more before his eyes.  This was the end, and his master-question, apprehension for the answer to which was now torturing his face and well-nigh bursting his heart, was still unasked.

“Ho—­he that spoke with me—­the master,” he cried in a voice that ran high, “is he there?”

“Yes, yes!” came the other voice across the water, sick with suspense. “Oh, be quick!”

There was a moment in which hoarse cries from many voices, a heavy thud and rumble on wood, and a crash of timbers and a gurgle and a splash were indescribably mingled; the gun under which Abel Keeling had lain had snapped her rotten breechings and plunged down the deck, carrying Bligh’s unconscious form with it.  The deck came up vertical, and for one instant longer Abel Keeling clung to the belfry.