It was not, however, till the next day that I realized what the most thrilling part of the ship was.  Under the protection of another high officer I had climbed to the bridge—­seventy-five feet above the level of the sea—­which bridge had been very seriously disestablished by an ambitious wave a couple of years before—­and had there inspected the devices for detecting and extinguishing fires in distant holds by merely turning a handle, and the charts and the telephones and the telegraphs, and the under-water signaling, and the sounding-tubes, and the officers’ piano; and I had descended by way of the capstan-gear (which, being capable of snapping a chain that would hold two hundred and sixty tons in suspension, was suitably imprisoned in a cage, like a fierce wild animal) right through the length of the vessel to the wheel-house aft.  It was comforting to know that if six alternative steering-wheels were smashed, one after another, there remained a seventh gear to be worked, chiefly by direct force of human arm.  And, after descending several more stories, I had seen the actual steering—­the tremendous affair moving to and fro, majestic and apparently capricious, in obedience to the light touch of a sailor six hundred feet distant.  And then I had seen the four shafts, revolving lazily one hundred and eighty-four to the minute; and got myself involved in dangerous forests of greasy machinery, whizzing all deserted in a very high temperature under electric bulbs.  Only at rare intervals did I come across a man in brown doing nothing in particular—­as often as not gazing at a dial; there were dials everywhere, showing pressures and speeds.  And then I had come to the dynamo-room, where the revolutions were twelve hundred to the minute, and then to the turbines themselves—­insignificant little things, with no swagger of huge crank and piston, disappointing little things that developed as much as one-third of the horse-power required for all the electricity of New York.

And then, lastly, when I had supposed myself to be at the rock-bottom of the steamer, I had been instructed to descend in earnest, and I went down and down steel ladders, and emerged into an enormous, an incredible cavern, where a hundred and ninety gigantic furnaces were being fed every ten minutes by hundreds of tiny black dolls called firemen.  I, too, was a doll as I looked up at the high white-hot mouth of a furnace and along the endless vista of mouths....  Imagine hell with the addition of electric light, and you have it!...  And up-stairs, far above on the surface of the water, confectioners were making fancy cakes, and the elevator-boy was doing his work!...  Yes, the inferno was the most thrilling part of the ship; and no other part of the ship could hold a candle to it.  And I remained of this conviction even when I sat in the captain’s own room, smoking his august cigars and turning over his books.  I no longer thought, “Every revolution of the propellers brings me nearer to that shore.”  I thought, “Every shovelful flung into those white-hot mouths brings me nearer.”