"'In the middle of all the atrocities'! The flashy, bombastic phraseology came back to me with grim insistence that night when I went down at eight o'clock to look after the boilers and pumps and to make, with entirely inadequate means, those brass screws for the dynamo-engine. The engine-room was in darkness save for the hand-lamp that hung over the vice-bench. The fat cotton-wick smoked and crackled, the light draught swirling it towards my head at times, singeing my hair and making my eyes water. Behind me the silent, heated engines stood up, stark and ominous like some emblem of my destiny watching me. The white faces of the gauges over the starting handles stared blankly. From the stokehold came the occasional clink of a shovel or the hollow clang of a fire-door flung to. And I worked. I fought with the greasy brass and the broken, worn-out tools. I made wasters and started again. The sweat poured off me, and I drank thirstily the warm water in the can that hung over my head in the ventilator. It was ten o'clock when I realized I had made but one screw. The fireman on duty came through, and remarking that he thought the wind had gone round, climbed the ladder to change the ventilators. I heard the groan of the cowl as he pulled at it and then my lamp flared gustily in a light breeze that came down. Light as it was it was a blessed relief. It was more. It was a message. There was a strange smell about it that gave a new turn to my thoughts. A smell of the land, of the dark forests and fragrant plantations. Another stock phrase came to me--'spicy breezes.' Working there at my miserable task, I wondered if these were the 'spicy breezes' of the hymn-books. Of a sudden I threw down my tools and went up the ladder to look round. All day there had been in my mind a sort of undertow of resentment at the tacit decision that I ought not to want to go ashore. I did want to. It seemed to me an outrage to come so far and remain a prisoner in bondage on the ship. I leaned on the rail by the gangway and looked along the wooden wharf to where a few lights twinkled in the distance. Higher up, beyond the cutting for the railway, the dark mass of a big shed loomed up against the lights of what I supposed was Port Duluth. And from where I stood I could hear a steady rhythmic throb, the unmistakable sound of an engine. I wondered what it could be. Was it one of those weird affairs I remembered in our catalogues, colonial engines with grotesque fireboxes and elaborate funnels, for burning wood instead of coal? I looked round. Nobody in sight. Everybody was below. The Chief and Second were asleep, old Croasan was in his room with a bottle of gin, drinking steadily. In another moment I had gone down the gangway and was making for the shed. Just then I felt if I didn't speak to somebody who wasn't under the spell of the _Corydon_, I would go crazy. I slipped into an excavation and skinned my knees. I fell over some stacked rails and barked my shins.