It was no good to lift up one's voice against enthusiasm of this sort, so I let him lead me to his room, and took from him a trunk with some linen. As he said, it was more convenient to have my own things, and we were much of a build, so that his clothes were no ill-fit; and he was ridiculously generous, pressing all that he had upon me, and lending me a great gold watch and gold studs that were illicitly gotten, I felt sure.
In the end I had quite a store of clothing; and I waited while he finished his own work that we might go down together to the launch awaiting us. There we found Black, watching men who were putting large bales of goods into the screw steamer, and everywhere there was sign of the break-up of the settlement. The captain merely nodded when I gave him a word, and I thought that he was sore depressed, with scarce energy enough to be irritable. He seemed to doubt the wisdom of the departure even then; and he often hesitated in his walk, looking up to the windows of his home behind him. At the last, when the negro servants had come down the iron stairway, he locked the great door after them; and then he stood and cast his gaze over to the hills and the desolate land, which I believed he had a great kindness for. When he did join us, he gave the word, "Let her go!" with a dogged sort of indifference; and at his command the launch ploughed ahead, and passed through the cañon to the outer basin.
The sun was almost in the horizon then, and the northern lights were playing in the heavens, so that all the water was then alight with the glory of a hundred colours. Now orange, or a lighter golden, or blue as the Corsican Sea, or flaming scarlet, or emerald green, or all shades of yellow, with the pink and pearl and fainter green as of a colossal opal, the light fell and spread from bight to bight, and crag to crag; and above there were sheets of eruptive flame and great rumblings, and mighty arcs of fire spanning the whole heavens, and gripping them as with the glittering jewelled hand of some monstrous keeper of the skies whose mutterings came to us below. Or the scene changed again, and it was as though elves of the zenith had brought their golden caskets above the firmament, and there had burst them open, so that all the jewels of the light rained upon sea and land, and burnt each other with their own beauty as they fell; and the earth answered them back with her shining face. One of the supreme moments of life, truly, to bathe in this shower of multi-coloured splendour, to follow it in its golden path, where rocks took shape, and snow-forms lived, and the seas danced to its accompanying music, and one stood nearer to the great mysteries while yet farther from the homes of man.
Black watched the aurora as we watched it, but chiefly as it played upon his ship, lying moored in the very centre of the outer basin. They had made a great change in her since I had seen her but two days before; for she was now given bulwarks of white canvas, and her funnel was painted white, while covers hid away the bright points of her deck-houses and her turrets. She had become a white ship; and her transformation had been made with vast skill, so that I felt I should not have known her had I met her in the Atlantic. From her position away from the shaft of the mine, it was evident that she was ready to weigh, and I was reminded grimly of her mission by seeing a streamer of black at her mast-head instead of the Blue Peter. This time, too, there was a faint haze above her funnel, as though coal was being burnt in her furnaces; yet I had no wonder that I did not see steam coming from her, for I knew that she was driven by gas, and was in many ways a ship of mystery.
We boarded her at a ladder amidships, for the most part of her accommodation was contained in a towering deck erection round her funnel. Here there were two stages of cabins with a wide gallery running between them, and protruding so that it was directly above the water. There was, indeed, a companion-way aft of this which led to the cabin I had occupied when a prisoner in the ship, and I found at a later time that the library of the vessel, with the store-rooms and a number of private cabins, was built in the 'tween decks abaft the funnel. Yet the great saloon I was to use during so many months, the quarters which Black occupied, the doctor's room, the rooms for the engineers, and for certain of the others who were privileged, were all ranged amidships; and I learned that while there was a big fo'castle, it was given over entirely to the niggers, with whom the white men would not serve. These superior fellows, as they thought themselves, had accommodation in the poop, where there was a big cabin with berths all round it; yet with all this, the small part of the whole vessel devoted to quarters was noteworthy, and was designed, I did not doubt, for some purpose which I should learn presently.
These things I did not ascertain, you may be sure, on first boarding the ship. Although they left me to myself upon the high gallery whence I could see all the life on the decks below, they were so busy with the preparation for weighing anchor that no man spoke a word to me. The hands themselves, the moment they were afloat, settled down to work with surprising steadiness. Black upon the bridge now wore a smart uniform with gold buttons and much show of lace; and the self-command of the man, the perfect knowledge of all things nautical which he displayed, and his all-absorbing love of his child, the ship, accounted for much that I had not understood in him before. I found to my amazement that Doctor Osbart acted not only as surgeon to the crew, but also as second officer; "Four-Eyes" being first officer; and the bully, "Roaring John," third. The coarse-mouthed Scotsman who assumed the title of "meenister" was, they told me, as good a seaman as any of them, and a wonderful gunner, so that he was in charge of the armament, with a big staff of men at his back. Of the engineers I saw nothing on first coming aboard; but later I heard the sound of pumping below, and there came up to the bridge where Black and the others were, a little, thin, wizened, and spectacled man, quite bald, very ragged and black, yet with a head on him that could have stamped him "First-Class" in any assembly of the learned. I thought at the first glance that he was a German, and my surmise was confirmed by the doctor, who remembered me at last, and said—
"Do you see that little fellow?—well, he's the genius of this ship. He's deaf and dumb, and no man has ever heard a word from his lips; but he designed our engines, and he runs them with his three sons. It's almost pitiable to see the man's disregard for anything but that infernal machinery. He never leaves it; it's meat and drink to him. If we make money, he doesn't want it; if we're going for a spell ashore, he won't come, but stays here poking about the wheels. He was the first man in all Europe to see that gas would finally supplant steam for maritime vessels; and Black gave him carte blanche to carry out his ideas on this ship. You may be surprised to hear it, but fore and aft in those great cigar-shaped ends of ours we have nothing but gas—three million feet, at a pressure of between two and three atmospheres. Why, man, it's the idea of the century; for every four pounds of coal burnt by an Atlantic liner, we don't burn a pound. We can steam for ten days without lighting a fire; and all the coal we need to go round the world will go in our bunkers. Save for that, and Karl Remey's genius, there wouldn't be a man jack of us with a neck to call his own to-day. Now, we snap our fingers at the best of them; there isn't a cruiser that can live with the thirty knots we can show; and there isn't a line-of-battle ship swimming that could get the better of us while our engines are moving. It's a big claim you think, but wait until you see us in action, then you'll know how much we owe to the little man in rags, but who has one of the clearest brains that ever was put into human being."
I was silent under this revelation, for it came to me that, with all the terrors of the great ship, there was also a scientific side, which marked the presence of a mighty intellect. The doctor saw the impression he had made upon me, and he said—
"To-morrow we will show you more; you shall meet the ragged man——"
"Which is mysel'," said the Scotsman, who had joined us silently, "mysel' that has'na a dud to my back. D'ye ken that when there's ony distribution o' the gudes I get a' the female apparel; which is no justice ava for a meenister, let alone a sea-faring man."
"Never mind, Dick," said the doctor laughing, as I did; "we'll beg a skirt for you the first time we say how-d'ye-do to a passenger vessel——"
"Hands, heave anchor!" roared Black at that moment; and our conversation stopped suddenly at