"We made our way along a flat iron ledge--a grating, really, beneath which lunged huge pistons of steel--down vertical ladders into a cavern reeking with the smell of hot steam and dripping oil. All about were stars of electric light illumining the darkness, out of which stood strange shapes--a canebrake of steel rods, huge sawed-off roots of pillar-blocks, enormous cylinders rising up like giant trees from out a jungle of tangled steel. "At the bottom of this morass a great boa constrictor of a shaft, smooth-skinned, glistening, turning lazily in its bed of grimy water, its head and tail lost in the gloom. Beyond this, along a narrow foot-path, a low open door leading to the mouth of hell. Here were men stripped to the waist, the sweat from their reeking bodies making flesh-colored channels down their blackened skins. Some were shielding their faces from the blistering heat as they wrenched apart the fusing fires with long steel bars; others dashed into the mouths of a hungry furnace shovelfuls of coal, blinding the light for an instant, the white sulphurous breath pouring from its blazing nostrils. On one side before the row of hot-mouthed beasts opened a smaller cavern, its air choked with fine black dust; still other men shovelled here, filling iron barrows which they trundled out to more half-naked men before the scorching furnaces. A new gang now joined the group, men with clean faces and hands and half-scoured backs and breasts. This new gang had had a wash and four hours sleep in an air fouled by dust and dead steam. At sight of them the old workers dropped their bars and shovels, disappeared through the door by which we had entered, and rolled into bunks racked up one above the other like coffins in a catacomb. "On one side of the door through which the new gang entered was an inscription in chalk. The leader of the gang stopped and examined it carefully. "'Clean stringers inside pocket,' the record said. "The stringers were the cross-beams tying the ship together, about which the coal was packed; the pocket was one of the ship's bins. These instructions showed which death-pit pit was to be worked first. "The Engineer made no explanatory remarks as I looked about. It was all there before me. The man with the letter had stood where these men stood; blistered by the same heat, befouled with the same grime, half strangled with the same coal-dust; had eaten his meals, drunk his coffee, staggered to his bunk, been carried insensible to the small square room on the deck above, laid on a cot, and was now dead and to be buried at midnight. That was all! * * * * *