chiefly by direct force of human arm. And, after descending several more
stories, I had seen the actual steering--the tremendous affair moving to
and fro, majestic and apparently capricious, in obedience to the light
touch of a sailor six hundred feet distant. And then I had seen the four
shafts, revolving lazily one hundred and eighty-four to the minute; and
got myself involved in dangerous forests of greasy machinery, whizzing
all deserted in a very high temperature under electric bulbs. Only at
rare intervals did I come across a man in brown doing nothing in
particular--as often as not gazing at a dial; there were dials
everywhere, showing pressures and speeds. And then I had come to the
dynamo-room, where the revolutions were twelve hundred to the minute,
and then to the turbines themselves--insignificant little things, with
no swagger of huge crank and piston, disappointing little things that
developed as much as one-third of the horse-power required for all the
electricity of New York.

And then, lastly, when I had supposed myself to be at the rock-bottom
of the steamer, I had been instructed to descend in earnest, and I went
down and down steel ladders, and emerged into an enormous, an incredible
cavern, where a hundred and ninety gigantic furnaces were being fed
every ten minutes by hundreds of tiny black dolls called firemen. I,
too, was a doll as I looked up at the high white-hot mouth of a furnace
and along the endless vista of mouths.... Imagine hell with the addition
of electric light, and you have it!... And up-stairs, far above on the
surface of the water, confectioners were making fancy cakes, and the
elevator-boy was doing his work!... Yes, the inferno was the most
thrilling part of the ship; and no other part of the ship could hold a
candle to it. And I remained of this conviction even when I sat in the
captain's own room, smoking his august cigars and turning over his
books. I no longer thought, "Every revolution of the propellers brings