The boy obeyed, stiffly, for he yet ached in every limb from the resuscitative rubbing administered by Petty Officer Stoll and his assistant—and his temples throbbed, and there was a singing in his ears. Perhaps that was from the smell of the petrol! One breathed petrol—devoured tinned meat stew petrol-flavoured, and drank soup and coffee made with petrol—judging by the tang upon the palate—on board the German submarine. The hatch at the top of the dripping steel ladder was open, letting in the smell of the sea tanged with the odours of fish and rotten seaweed and sewage. One emerged through the manhole into a strange, windless woolly world. Through a weeping woolly-grey mist, grey, greasy-looking water lapped and licked against a weedy jetty of grey stone alongside which U-18 lay with the fog smoking off her whitey grey painted steel skin. A bluff-bowed galliot, a yacht or two, and some lighters laden with bricks and cement sat on the blue-grey mud of a small harbour; grey and white seagulls were feeding on the mud, gaily-painted row-boats were lying on the shelving beach of weedy sand. To the right-hand a lighthouse or beacon made a yellow blur in the prevailing woolliness. Behind one, the foggy land seemed mixed up with the foggy sea, even as the yellow-white curd mixes with the whey in a dish of rennet. North, the intermittent beam thrown from a lighthouse came and went in sudden winks. Facing to the mainland again, one made out east of the quay an aggregation of tiled roofs and chimneys, and a wooden church-spire with a quaint gilded weathercock. Running south were black and white signal-posts, buffers, and a big, barn-like railway station. Beyond, the fog came down so like a curtain, that the shining metals of the permanent way ran into it and ended as sharply as though they had been cut off. There was a trampling of feet on the steel ladder. Heads showed through the manhole, and a rough hand caught the boy by the collar of his pneumatic jacket and jerked him out of his betters’ way. Luttha appeared in his panoply of yellow oilskins, passed aft and went up on the platform, where his second officer and another stood together at the rail. Von Herrnung followed, dough-pale, and wearing an old Navy cap in place of his goggled helmet, and a junior officer came after. They brought the tang of schnapps with the smell of their oilskin coats. The boy had seen them drinking and nodding to each other at the narrow table in the officer’s cabin, as he had hurried into his clothes. "_Gute Reise! Viel Glück!_" Luttha had shouted to von Herrnung, and waved his hand with a heartiness that did not seem quite real.