top of me, and the big oar jammed across our backs."

"Well?" Charlie's eyes were alive and alight. He was looking at the wall
behind my chair.

"I don't know how we fought. The men were trampling all over my back, and
I lay low. Then our rowers on the left side--tied to their oars, you
know--began to yell and back water. I could hear the water sizzle, and we
spun round like a cockchafer and I knew, lying where I was, that there was
a galley coming up bow-on, to ram us on the left side. I could just lift
up my head and see her sail over the bulwarks. We wanted to meet her bow
to bow, but it was too late. We could only turn a little bit because the
galley on our right had hooked herself on to us and stopped our moving.
Then, by gum! there was a crash! Our left oars began to break as the other
galley, the moving one y'know, stuck her nose into them. Then the
lower-deck oars shot up through the deck planking, butt first, and one of
them jumped clean up into the air and came down again close to my head."

"How was that managed?"

"The moving galley's bow was plunking them back through their own
oar-holes, and I could hear the devil of a shindy in the decks below. Then
her nose caught us nearly in the middle, and we tilted sideways, and the
fellows in the right-hand galley unhitched their hooks and ropes, and
threw things on to our upper deck--arrows, and hot pitch or something that
stung, and we went up and up and up on the left side, and the right side
dipped, and I twisted my head round and saw the water stand still as it
topped the right bulwarks, and then it curled over and crashed down on the
whole lot of us on the right side, and I felt it hit my back, and I woke."