’I can easily picture him to myself in the peopled gloom of the cavernous place, with the light of the globe-lamp falling on a small portion of the bulkhead that had the weight of the ocean on the other side, and the breathing of unconscious sleepers in his ears.  I can see him glaring at the iron, startled by the falling rust, overburdened by the knowledge of an imminent death.  This, I gathered, was the second time he had been sent forward by that skipper of his, who, I rather think, wanted to keep him away from the bridge.  He told me that his first impulse was to shout and straightway make all those people leap out of sleep into terror; but such an overwhelming sense of his helplessness came over him that he was not able to produce a sound.  This is, I suppose, what people mean by the tongue cleaving to the roof of the mouth.  “Too dry,” was the concise expression he used in reference to this state.  Without a sound, then, he scrambled out on deck through the number one hatch.  A windsail rigged down there swung against him accidentally, and he remembered that the light touch of the canvas on his face nearly knocked him off the hatchway ladder.

’He confessed that his knees wobbled a good deal as he stood on the foredeck looking at another sleeping crowd.  The engines having been stopped by that time, the steam was blowing off.  Its deep rumble made the whole night vibrate like a bass string.  The ship trembled to it.

’He saw here and there a head lifted off a mat, a vague form uprise in sitting posture, listen sleepily for a moment, sink down again into the billowy confusion of boxes, steam-winches, ventilators.  He was aware all these people did not know enough to take intelligent notice of that strange noise.  The ship of iron, the men with white faces, all the sights, all the sounds, everything on board to that ignorant and pious multitude was strange alike, and as trustworthy as it would for ever remain incomprehensible.  It occurred to him that the fact was fortunate.  The idea of it was simply terrible.

’You must remember he believed, as any other man would have done in his place, that the ship would go down at any moment; the bulging, rust-eaten plates that kept back the ocean, fatally must give way, all at once like an undermined dam, and let in a sudden and overwhelming flood.  He stood still looking at these recumbent bodies, a doomed man aware of his fate, surveying the silent company of the dead.  They were dead!  Nothing could save them!  There were boats enough for half of them perhaps, but there was no time.  No time!  No time!  It did not seem worth while to open his lips, to stir hand or foot.  Before he could shout three words, or make three steps, he would be floundering in a sea whitened awfully by the desperate struggles of human beings, clamorous with the distress of cries for help.  There was no help.  He imagined what would happen perfectly; he went through it all motionless by the hatchway with the lamp in his hand—­he went through it to the very last harrowing detail.  I think he went through it again while he was telling me these things he could not tell the court.