A stifling atmosphere, hot, damp and thick with the smell of oil, assailed him as he descended the steep iron ladder. The sweat broke out on his brow as he passed along a gloomy narrow corridor, just wide enough for a man, between packed boiler-tubes ranged on both sides to the roof like bottles in a wine merchant's vault. He emerged finally into a large space, brilliant with electric light. On a platform at one end stood the staff-engineer with some of his assistants, surrounded by a formidable array of indicator-dials, telegraphs, telephones, speaking-tubes, and other fittings of whose use he had but a vague idea. The engineer still worried at his little grey moustache as he gazed below him to where the turbines hummed in their casings. It was comparatively quiet down here. Only a few men were visible, but the lieutenant knew that a hundred or so were labouring fiercely in the bowels of this mass of mechanism which gave the ship her life. From a manhole at the other end of the engine-room a couple of men were drawing out what seemed to be a corpse, its naked torso black as with an explosion. It was a stoker who had collapsed. The staff-engineer frowned as the limp body was carried off to the sick bay. He turned and snarled irritably at the question of the lieutenant. "250 revolutions and not a turn more can we get out of this Gott-verfluchte coal. That is the tenth man in the last quarter of an hour. There's no use in worrying us. We can do no more. Go and tell that to the Herr Kapitän and leave us to our work." "It seems clear in front, but there is a couple of cruisers somewhere behind," observed the lieutenant in a placatory voice. "I don't care if Hell's in front of us and the Devil himself behind!" roared the engineer, losing self-control in the exasperation of his nerves. "We should at least get something that would give some heat there. _Gott sei dank!_ Do you know how many tons of this muck we are burning per hour?" he finished savagely. The lieutenant waited for the answer. "Thirty tons per hour--and we are only getting 250 revolutions--go and tell that to the Herr Kapitän!" The lieutenant's own irritation was inflamed by this display of temper. "We didn't supply the coal----" The engineer overwhelmed him with a roar of curses, and finished with an angry order to leave his engine-room. His bulging, birdlike eyes glared with an insane hatred.