the whole width of the doorway and stretched his neck. And at first
he perceived only what he had come to seek: six small yellow flames
swinging violently on the great body of the dusk.

It was stayed like the gallery of a mine, with a row of stanchions
in the middle, and cross-beams overhead, penetrating into the gloom
ahead--indefinitely. And to port there loomed, like the caving in of
one of the sides, a bulky mass with a slanting outline. The whole place,
with the shadows and the shapes, moved all the time. The boatswain
glared: the ship lurched to starboard, and a great howl came from that
mass that had the slant of fallen earth.

Pieces of wood whizzed past. Planks, he thought, inexpressibly startled,
and flinging back his head. At his feet a man went sliding over,
open-eyed, on his back, straining with uplifted arms for nothing: and
another came bounding like a detached stone with his head between his
legs and his hands clenched. His pigtail whipped in the air; he made a
grab at the boatswain's legs, and from his opened hand a bright white
disc rolled against the boatswain's foot. He recognized a silver dollar,
and yelled at it with astonishment. With a precipitated sound of
trampling and shuffling of bare feet, and with guttural cries, the mound
of writhing bodies piled up to port detached itself from the ship's side
and sliding, inert and struggling, shifted to starboard, with a dull,
brutal thump. The cries ceased. The boatswain heard a long moan through
the roar and whistling of the wind; he saw an inextricable confusion of
heads and shoulders, naked soles kicking upwards, fists raised, tumbling
backs, legs, pigtails, faces.

"Good Lord!" he cried, horrified, and banged-to the iron door upon this
vision.