FIRE-DRILL ON A GERMAN LINER] Let it not be supposed, from the heading of this chapter, that it is the writer's purpose to draw any lurid picture of the dangers of ocean travel. These are no greater to-day than they were before the _Titanic_ went down. Icebergs have swept down from the Arctic seas from time immemorial, and year by year they will continue to throw the shadow of their awful menace across the lines of steamship travel. Fog, with its ever-present dangers of collision, will continue to infest the ocean highways; and always, the half-submerged derelict, a peril scarcely less than that of the iceberg, will continue to sail its uncharted course over the high seas. The strength of the impulse to build unsinkable ships will be exactly in proportion to our realisation of the dangers which beset ocean travel. The toll of human life exacted in the recent disaster will lose its one possible compensation, if it fails to impress deeply the very serious lesson that since the sea is not man's natural element, he can hold his way safely across its surface only at the cost of most careful preparation and eternal vigilance. Protracted and amazing immunity from disasters of portentous magnitude has bred in us something of that very contempt for the dangers of the sea above referred to. We have piled deck upon deck until the "floating palace" of the sea towers twice as far above the water-line as it extends below it. So rapidly have we added weight to weight and horsepower to horsepower, that both the mass and the power have been quadrupled. The giant steamship of to-day, as she rushes through the black night and the all-obscuring fog, represents a potential engine of destruction, for which no parallel can be found in the whole field of human activity. Do you doubt it? Then learn that on that fatal night when the _Titanic_ bore headlong into the icefield, she embodied in her onrushing mass an energy equal to that of the combined broadsides of our two most powerful battleships, the _Florida_ and the _Utah_. Which is to say that, if the two dreadnoughts had discharged their twenty twelve-inch guns, at point-blank range, against the iceberg which sank this ship, they would have struck a combined blow of less energy than that delivered by the _Titanic_. And every one of these guns, be it remembered, delivers its shell with an energy of 50,000 foot-tons--sufficient to lift either of these battleships nearly two and a half feet into the air. [Illustration: Hose from bellows supplies fresh air to man with smoke helmet. FIRE-DRILL ON A GERMAN LINER]