"We are not what you might call idle," groaned all the frames together, as the "Dimbula" climbed a big wave, lay on her side at the top, and shot into the next hollow, twisting as she descended. A huge swell pushed up exactly under her middle, and her bow and stern hung free, with nothing to support them, and then one joking wave caught her up at the bow, and another at the stern, while the rest of the water fell away from under her, just to see how she would like it, and she was held up at the two ends, and the weight of the cargo and the machinery fell on the groaning iron keels and bilge stringers. "Ease off! Ease off there!" roared the garboard strake. "I want an eighth of an inch play. D'you hear me, you young rivets!" "Ease off! ease off!" cried the bilge stringers. "Don't hold us so tight to the frames!" "Ease off!" grunted the deck beams, as the "Dimbula" rolled fearfully. "You've cramped our knees into the stringers and we can't move. Ease off, you flat-headed little nuisances." [Illustration: "AN UNUSUALLY SEVERE PITCH ... HAD LIFTED THE BIG THROBBING SCREW NEARLY TO THE SURFACE."] Then two converging seas hit the bows, one on each side, and fell away in torrents of streaming thunder. "Ease off!" shouted the forward collision bulkhead. "I want to crumple up, but I'm stiffened in every direction. Ease off, you dirty little forge filings. Let me breathe!" All the hundreds of plates that are riveted on to the frames, and make the outside skin of every steamer, echoed the call, for each plate wanted to shift and creep a little, and each plate, according to its position, complained against the rivets. "We can't help it! _We_ can't help it!" they murmured. "We're put here to hold you, and we're going to do it. You never pull us twice in the same direction. If you'd say what you were going to do next, we'd try to meet your views." "As far as I could feel," said the upper-deck planking, and that was four inches thick, "every single iron near me was pushing or pulling in opposite directions. Now, what's the sense of that? My friends, let us all pull together." "Pull any way you please." roared the funnel, "so long as you don't try your experiments on _me_. I need fourteen wire ropes, all pulling in opposite directions, to hold me steady. Isn't that so?" "We believe you, my boy!" whistled the funnel stays through their clenched teeth, as they twanged in the wind from the top of the funnel to the deck. "Nonsense! We must all pull together," the decks repeated. "Pull lengthways." "Very good," said the stringers; "then stop pushing sideways when you get wet. Be content to run gracefully fore and aft, and curve in at the ends as we do." "No, no curves at the end. A very slight workmanlike curve from side to side, with a good grip at each knee, and little pieces welded on," said the deck beams.