at it in that light. And sure enough, when we had passed out of
the Gulf Stream and the sea had smoothed itself out, I made a
speedy and satisfactory recovery; but if it had been seasickness
I should have confessed it in a minute. I have no patience with
those who quibble and equivocate in regard to their having been
seasick.

I had one relapse--a short one, but painful. In an incautious
moment, when I wist not wot I wotted, I accepted an invitation
from the chief engineer to go below. We went below--miles and
miles, I think--to where, standing on metal runways that were hot
to the foot, overalled Scots ministered to the heart and the lungs
and the bowels of that ship. Electricity spat cracklingly in our
faces, and at our sides steel shafts as big as the pillars of a
temple spun in coatings of spumy grease; and through the double
skin of her we could hear, over our heads, a mighty Niagaralike
churning as the slew-footed screws kicked us forward twenty-odd
knots an hour. Someone raised the cover of a vat, and peering
down into the opening we saw a small, vicious engine hard at work,
entirely enveloped in twisty, coily, stewy depths of black oil,
like a devil-fish writhing in sea-ooze and cuttle-juice.

So then we descended another mile or two to an inferno, full of
naked, sooty devils forever feeding sulphurous pitfires in the
nethermost parlors of the damned; but they said this was the
stokehole; and I was in no condition to argue with them, for I
had suddenly begun to realize that I was far from being a well
person. As one peering through a glass darkly, I saw one of the
attendant demons sluice his blistered bare breast with cold water,
so that the sweat and grime ran from him in streams like ink; and