The alarm-gongs had already sent the guns' crews to their invisible guns, and immediately after the explosion "Panic stations" was ordered, followed in due course by "Abandon ship." The Navigator, having finished his "sight," and now acting as "Master," abandoned ship with the "panic party." No sooner had the boats been lowered and shoved off from the ship's side, however, than the Chief Engineer rang up from below and reported that the after bulkhead had gone and that the engine-room was filling fast. Peering, on all fours, through a slit in the bridge-screen, waiting for the inevitable periscope to appear, the Commander bade him hold on as long as he could and keep enough steam to work the pumps; when the water had extinguished the fires, and then only, the engines were abandoned and the staff remained concealed. This they did, crawling eventually on to the cylinders to escape from the rising flood. Shortly after the torpedo struck the ship the periscope of a submarine broke the surface a couple of hundred yards distant, evidently watching proceedings with a deliberate, cautious scrutiny. Moving slowly through the water, like the fin of a waiting shark, the sinister object came gradually down the ship's side, within five yards of the breathless boats, and not ten yards from where the Commander lay beside the voice-pipes that connected him with the Assistant-Paymaster, R.N.R., who, concealed in the gun control position, was awaiting the order to open fire. From the altitude of the bridge, the submerged whale-back hull was plainly visible to the figure crouched behind the bridge-screens, and the temptation to yield to the impulse of the moment, to open fire and end the suspense, shook even his iron nerves. A lucky shot might pierce the lead-grey shadow that moved 15 feet beneath the surface; but water plays strange tricks with projectiles, deflecting them at unexpected ricochets, at angles no man can foretell; moreover, the submarine was in diving trim. The odds against a broadside overwhelming her before she could plunge into the depths and escape were too great. So the Commander waited, with self-control that was almost superhuman, and, prone beside their guns, unseeing and unseen, his men waited too.