There was nothing whatever suggestive of water--soft, fluent, trickling water--in the first shattering impact of that mighty blow. It was as solid as a collision between ship and ship; indeed, the recollection I have of a railway wreck I was once in on a line in the Argentine Pampas is of a shock less shattering. It is difficult to record events in their proper sequence, partly because they were all happening at once, and partly because the self-centred frame of mind I was in at the moment was not favourable for detached observation. The noise and the jar of the crash were stupendous, yet neither of these has left so vivid a mental impression as the uncanny writhing of the two-inches-thick steel stanchion to which I was endeavouring to hold, and the nerve-racking sound of rending metal. I have no recollection of hearing the clink of broken glass, nor of being struck by pieces of it; yet all the panes of heavy plate which screened the forward end of the bridge--of a thickness, one had supposed, to withstand anything likely to assail them--were swept away as though they had been no more than the rice-paper squares of a Japanese window. [Illustration: WHERE THE GREAT LINER PLOWED ALONG] [Illustration: WE HAD COLLIDED WITH THE "BRICK WALL"] [Illustration: NOW SHE WAS BACK AT BASE] The rush of water, of course, followed instantly upon the crash, yet, so vivid are my impressions of the things intimately connected with the blow itself that it seems as though there was an appreciable interval between the fall of that and the time when the enveloping cataclysm transformed the universe into a green-white stream of brine. From ahead, above and from both sides the flood poured, to meet and mingle in a whirling maelstrom in the middle of the bridge. There was nothing of blown spindrift to it; it was green and solid and flowed with a heave and a hurl that made no more of slamming a man to the deck than of tossing a life-buoy. I went the whole length of the bridge when I lost my grip on the port stanchion, brought up against the after-rail, and then went down into a tangle of signal flags. I remember distinctly, though, that the walls of water rushing by completely blotted out sea and sky to port and starboard, and that there was all the darkness of late twilight in the cavern of the engulfed bridge. Then the great sea tumbled aft along the main deck, and it grew light again. The captain and the helmsman had both kept their feet, and the latter, dripping from head to heel, was just throwing over the engine-room telegraph as I shook off my mantle of coloured bunting and crawled back to my moorings at the stanchion. Immediately afterwards I saw him jump on to the after-rail and make some sort of negative signal to a couple of half-drowned boys who, waist-deep in swirling water, were pawing desperately among the depth-charges. Then he came over and joined me for a few moments.