Two nights ago I was awakened half suffocated, to find my cabin full of strong sulphurous fumes; but fancying them brought in through my open portholes from the smoke-stack by a shift aft of the wind, I paid no further attention to them. But when the next morning I as usual turned out on deck to see the sun rise, a commotion aft of me attracted my attention, Looking, I saw the first mate, chief engineer, and a party of sailors, all so begrimed with sweat and coal dust one could scarcely pick officers from seamen, rapidly ripping off the cover of one of the midship hatches, while others were flying about connecting up the deck fire hose. This didn't look a bit good to me, and when, an instant later, off came the hatch and out poured thick volumes of smoke, I failed to observe that it looked any better. When the hatch was removed, the men thrust the hose through it, and began deluging the burning bunker with water; for, luckily, it is only a bunker fire,--in a lower and comparatively small bunker. The fire had been discovered early the day previous, and for nearly twenty-four hours officers and seamen had been fighting it from below, without any mention to their two passengers of its existence, fighting by tireless shovelling to reach his seat. And now they were on deck, attacking it from above, only because the heat and fumes below had become so overpowering they could no longer work there. But after an hour's ventilation through the hatch and a continuous downpour of water, the first mate again led his men below. And so, the usual watches being divided into two-hour relays, the fight has gone on wearily but persistently, until now, the evening of the fourth day, the men are wan and haggard from the killing heat and foul air. In the engine-room in these latitudes the thermometer ranges from rarely under 108 degrees up to 130, and one has to stay down there only an hour, as I often have, until he is streaming with sweat as if he were in the unholiest heat of a Turkish bath. And as the burning bunker immediately adjoins the other end of the boiler room, to the heat of its own smouldering mass is added that of the fire boxes, until the temperature is probably close to 140 degrees. While the fire is confined to the bunker where it started, we are in no particular danger; but if it reaches the bunker immediately above, it will have a free run to the after hold, where several thousand packages of case oil are stored. In the open waist above the oil are a score or more big tanks of gasoline, and, on the poop immediately aft of that, a quantity of dynamite and several thousand detonating caps. Thus if the fire ever gets aft, things are apt to happen a trifle quicker than they can be dodged.