His voice stopped.  Captain Whalley, without relaxing the set severity of his features, moved his lips to ask in a quick mumble—­

“How near, Serang?”

“Very near now, Tuan,” the Malay muttered rapidly.

“Dead slow,” said the Captain aloud in a firm tone.

The Serang snatched at the handle of the telegraph.  A gong clanged down below.  Massy with a scornful snigger walked off and put his head down the engineroom skylight.

“You may expect some rare fooling with the engines, Jack,” he bellowed.  The space into which he stared was deep and full of gloom; and the gray gleams of steel down there seemed cool after the intense glare of the sea around the ship.  The air, however, came up clammy and hot on his face.  A short hoot on which it would have been impossible to put any sort of interpretation came from the bottom cavernously.  This was the way in which the second engineer answered his chief.

He was a middle-aged man with an inattentive manner, and apparently wrapped up in such a taciturn concern for his engines that he seemed to have lost the use of speech.  When addressed directly his only answer would be a grunt or a hoot, according to the distance.  For all the years he had been in the Sofala he had never been known to exchange as much as a frank Good-morning with any of his shipmates.  He did not seem aware that men came and went in the world; he did not seem to see them at all.  Indeed he never recognized his ship mates on shore.  At table (the four white men of the Sofala messed together) he sat looking into his plate dispassionately, but at the end of the meal would jump up and bolt down below as if a sudden thought had impelled him to rush and see whether somebody had not stolen the engines while he dined.  In port at the end of the trip he went ashore regularly, but no one knew where he spent his evenings or in what manner.  The local coasting fleet had preserved a wild and incoherent tale of his infatuation for the wife of a sergeant in an Irish infantry regiment.  The regiment, however, had done its turn of garrison duty there ages before, and was gone somewhere to the other side of the earth, out of men’s knowledge.  Twice or perhaps three times in the course of the year he would take too much to drink.  On these occasions he returned on board at an earlier hour than usual; ran across the deck balancing himself with his spread arms like a tight-rope walker; and locking the door of his cabin, he would converse and argue with himself the livelong night in an amazing variety of tones; storm, sneer, and whine with an inexhaustible persistence.  Massy in his berth next door, raising himself on his elbow, would discover that his second had remembered the name of every white man that had passed through the Sofala for years and years back.  He remembered the names of men that had died, that had gone home, that had gone to America:  he remembered in his cups the names of men whose connection with