Prince had been poking away at a sprayer as he talked, with the fluttering light-mote from the fire in the heart of the furnace playing on one of his squinting eyes in a way that, with the other quenched in shadow, gave his face a look of Cyclopean fierceness. "I jumped up on the tubes again to follow our little tin fish on its swim," he resumed. "There seemed to be a bit of a flap on the cruiser, for its next salvo fell a long way short of us. One of the shells--a five-or six-incher--did not explode, but bounced off the water and came 'skip-jacking' along straight for us. It kicked into the water twice before it reached us, the second time right at the base of the wave that was rolling up and hiding our sunken stern, and that seemed to give it just enough of an up-flip to make it clear the _Nairobi's_ shivering hull. It came so slow that I caught the glint of the copper band round its base, and so low that the after superstructure blotted it off from my sight as it passed over the stern. One of the after gun's crew told me he could have reached up and patted it as it tumbled along over his head. He said it was going so slow that he hardly felt any wind at all from it. Perhaps that was because he had his own wind up, though, for it was making a great buzz, and must have been carrying a big 'tail' of air in its wake. "I lost track of our mouldie when I ducked--no, I don't mind admitting that's just what I did, though it missed me by a mile--and before I could get my eye on its wake again it had gone home. I think they must have spotted it coming on the cruiser, for I saw her begin to alter course away just about the time I figured it was due to arrive. If they were altering to avoid the mouldie, they turned the wrong way, for it only brought right abreast the funnels what'd 'a' been a hit somewhere about the bridge. I've got a picture in my mind of what happened that I'm dead certain is as true as a photograph, and the spout of water that went up must have been almost exactly amidships. If the hit had been anywhere for'rard it would never have broken her back the way it did, and she might have got away. The funny part of it was that it was not the 'midships section of her, where the mouldie hit, that seemed to be lifted by the explosion. That part of her seemed just to go to pieces and begin to sink all at once, while the bow and stern halves started to come up and close together like a jack-knife. She must have gone down inside of a minute or two, but things were happening so fast I don't think I was looking when she disappeared."