“Next day it was my watch on deck from eight to twelve.  At breakfast the captain observed, ‘It’s wonderful how that smell hangs about the cabin.’  About ten, the mate being on the poop, I stepped down on the main-deck for a moment.  The carpenter’s bench stood abaft the mainmast:  I leaned against it sucking at my pipe, and the carpenter, a young chap, came to talk to me.  He remarked, ‘I think we have done very well, haven’t we?’ and then I perceived with annoyance the fool was trying to tilt the bench.  I said curtly, ‘Don’t, Chips,’ and immediately became aware of a queer sensation, of an absurd delusion,—­I seemed somehow to be in the air.  I heard all round me like a pent-up breath released—­as if a thousand giants simultaneously had said Phoo!—­and felt a dull concussion which made my ribs ache suddenly.  No doubt about it—­I was in the air, and my body was describing a short parabola.  But short as it was, I had the time to think several thoughts in, as far as I can remember, the following order:  ’This can’t be the carpenter—­What is it?—­Some accident—­Submarine volcano?—­Coals, gas!—­By Jove! we are being blown up—­Everybody’s dead—­I am falling into the after-hatch—­I see fire in it.’

“The coal-dust suspended in the air of the hold had glowed dull-red at the moment of the explosion.  In the twinkling of an eye, in an infinitesimal fraction of a second since the first tilt of the bench, I was sprawling full length on the cargo.  I picked myself up and scrambled out.  It was quick like a rebound.  The deck was a wilderness of smashed timber, lying crosswise like trees in a wood after a hurricane; an immense curtain of soiled rags waved gently before me—­it was the mainsail blown to strips.  I thought, The masts will be toppling over directly; and to get out of the way bolted on all-fours towards the poop-ladder.  The first person I saw was Mahon, with eyes like saucers, his mouth open, and the long white hair standing straight on end round his head like a silver halo.  He was just about to go down when the sight of the main-deck stirring, heaving up, and changing into splinters before his eyes, petrified him on the top step.  I stared at him in unbelief, and he stared at me with a queer kind of shocked curiosity.  I did not know that I had no hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes, that my young moustache was burnt off, that my face was black, one cheek laid open, my nose cut, and my chin bleeding.  I had lost my cap, one of my slippers, and my shirt was torn to rags.  Of all this I was not aware.  I was amazed to see the ship still afloat, the poop-deck whole—­and, most of all, to see anybody alive.  Also the peace of the sky and the serenity of the sea were distinctly surprising.  I suppose I expected to see them convulsed with horror . . . .  Pass the bottle.