But where now is the one-masted _Hercules_, which but a moment since went trembling at the bale of her own bellowing barbettes? The _Hercules_ is in a Nessus-shirt of flame. And whither the _Hercules_ is going, thither is the _Idaho_ going, and the _Dante_ gone, and gone the elongated length of the _Invincible_, and twenty destroyers, and the bow-works of the old _Powerful_, which stoops woefully there, screws in air, as the camel of the desert kneels and waits, while into her beam comes crashing the ram of the poopless _Deutschland_. Yet the _Boodah_ has not fired a gun! But now she fires: as the broadsides drench her anew, she fires, the hulk--all round the horizon--lowing in travail: and as there is no question of missing on the one side, so on the other is assurance, the _Boodah's_ broad-sides of 19.5-inchers and 9.5-inchers, ninety-two in all, being fired by the hand of Quilter-Beckett, who sits at a table grim with knobs, buttons, dial-faces, in a cabinet near a saloon where Hogarth, Loveday, and five lieutenants are lunching; and where he sits he can hear the band in an alcove rendering for the eaters Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: hear, not heed: for two gunners in each casemate have sighted a ship through pivoted glasses, whose fixing, disturbing an electrical circuit, prints the ship's distance on an indicator before the Admiral: whereupon he touches a button--many buttons--in intense succession: the _Boodah bawls_: and the thrust-back of her resentment becomes intolerable, the ships just like fawns under the paws of an old lion whose grisly jaws drip gore; the sharks that infest her will fare well of her hand. Of forty-three ships fixed, thirty-nine are hit, eleven founder: wreckage so vast and swift, that the Admiral, still afloat in a _Queen Mary_ pierced above-belt, is like a man stung by the tarantulas of distraction: tries to signal flight--flags cannot be seen; fires coloured pistol-lights: “Retire!”--and soon, all round, the circle is in flight. But hapless flight: the _Boodah_ is an octopus whose feelers reach far, and they, within her toils, cannot escape her omnipresence. She sends after them no guns: yet they are blown to atoms; the sea becomes a death-trap thick with pitfalls and shipwreck; one by one they are caught, they fly aloft like startled fowl, or they succumb, and lean, and stoop, and sink: the sea, for mile on mile, proving a hell of torpedoes-dirigible, automobile, mine. For in the matter of mines the _Boodah_ had all the advantages of a shore, and as to dirigible torpedoes more than all. Her mines, whose weight was adjusted to the specific gravity of salt water, sank till the pressure at ten fathoms arrested them, they, electrically connected with the forts, reaching out twenty miles; and the whole network, charted to an inch, was coordinated with the range-tables.