We went below--miles and
miles, I think--to where, standing on metal runways that were hot
to the foot, overalled Scots ministered to the heart and the lungs
and the bowels of that ship. Electricity spat cracklingly in our
faces, and at our sides steel shafts as big as the pillars of a
temple spun in coatings of spumy grease; and through the double
skin of her we could hear, over our heads, a mighty Niagaralike
churning as the slew-footed screws kicked us forward twenty-odd
knots an hour. Someone raised the cover of a vat, and peering
down into the opening we saw a small, vicious engine hard at work,
entirely enveloped in twisty, coily, stewy depths of black oil,
like a devil-fish writhing in sea-ooze and cuttle-juice.
So then we descended another mile or two to an inferno, full of
naked, sooty devils forever feeding sulphurous pitfires in the
nethermost parlors of the damned; but they said this was the
stokehole; and I was in no condition to argue with them, for I
had suddenly begun to realize that I was far from being a well
person. As one peering through a glass darkly, I saw one of the
attendant demons sluice his blistered bare breast with cold water,
so that the sweat and grime ran from him in streams like ink; and
peering in at a furnace door I saw a great angry sore of coals all
scabbed and crusted over. Then another demon, wielding a nine-foot
bar daintily as a surgeon wields a scalpel, reached in and stabbed
it in the center, so that the fire burst through and gushed up red
and rich, like blood from a wound newly lanced.
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