The speed at which the Fleet was travelling sent the wind thrumming through the halliards and funnel stays and past Thorogood's ears with a little whistling noise; otherwise few sounds reached him at the altitude at which he stood. On the signal-platform below, a number of signalmen were grouped round the flag-lockers with the halliards in their hands in instant readiness to hoist a signal. The Signal Boatswain had steadied his glass against a semaphore, and was studying something on the misty outskirts of the Fleet. The Quartermaster at the wheel was watching the compass card with a silent intensity that made his face look as if it had been carved in bronze. The telegraph-men maintained a conversation that was pitched in a low, deep note inaudible two yards away. It concerned the photograph of a mutual lady acquaintance, and has no place in this narrative. Thorogood moved to the rail and looked down at the familiar forecastle and teeming upper-deck, thirty feet below. Seen thus from above, the grey, sloping shields of the turrets, each with its great twin guns, looked like gigantic mythical tortoises with two heads and disproportionately long necks. It was the dinner hour, and men were moving about, walking up and down, or sitting about in little groups smoking. Some were playing cards in places sheltered from the wind and spray; near the blacksmith's forge a man was stooping patiently over a small black object: Thorogood raised his glasses for a moment and recognised the ship's cat, reluctantly undergoing instruction in jumping through the man's hands. The cooks of the Messes were wending their way in procession to the chutes at the ship's sides, carrying mess-kettles containing scraps and slops from the mess-deck dinner. For an instant the Officer of the Watch, looking down from that altitude and cut off from all sounds but that of the wind, experienced a feeling of unfamiliar detachment from the pulsating mass of metal beneath his feet. He had a vision of the electric-lit interior of the great ship, deck beneath deck, with men everywhere. Men rolled up in coats and oilskins, snatching half-an-hour's sleep along the crowded gun-batteries, men writing letters to sweethearts and wives, men laughing and quarrelling, or singing low-toned, melancholy ditties as they mended worn garments: hundreds and hundreds of reasoning human entities were crowded in those steel-walled spaces, each with his boundless hopes and affections, his separate fears and vices and conceptions of the Deity, and his small, incommunicable distresses....