The engine-rooms and stoke-holes of a great steamer are forbidden ground, are lands _taboo_, save to those specially asked to visit them. Here no interruptions may enter, for speed is the price of ceaseless vigilance, and horse-power spells fame and dividends. When you come to measure the region fairly, it broadens into a wonder-land; it shapes itself into a twilight island of mysteries, into a laboratory where grimy alchemists practise black magic and white. At first all seems confusion, but when the brain has co-ordinated certain factors, harmony is wooed from discord and order emerges from chaos. It is in the beginning all noise and tangled motion, and shining steel and oily smells; then succeeds a vague sense of bars moving up and down, and down and up, with pitiless regularity; of jiggering levers, keeping time rhythmically to any stray patter you may fit to their chanting; and, at last, the interdependence of rod grasping rod, of shooting straight lines seizing curved arms, of links limping backward and wriggling forward upon queer pivots, dawns upon you; and in the end you marvel at the nicety with which lever, weight, and fulcrum work, opening and closing hidden mechanisms, and functioning with an exactness that dignifies the fraction of a second into an appreciable quantity. Cranks whirl and whirl and whirl incessantly, holding in moveless grip the long shafting turning the churning screws; pumps pulsate and throb with muffled beat; gauge-arms vibrate jerkingly about narrow arcs, setting their standards of performance; and everywhere, if your ear be trained to this mechanical music, to this symphony in steam and steel, you see the officers and greasers conducting harmoniously the smoothly moving parts, as soothed with oil and caressed with waste they work without jar or friction, and despite the gales tossing the ship like a jolly-boat, on the angry ocean. It is a magic domain, and one may well wonder at the genius which, piling precedent upon precedent, chains these forces and makes them labor, even on an unstable platform, as their masters will.
In the stoke-hole, however, one leaves behind the formal and mathematical, and sees the picturesque with all its dirt unvarnished, with all its din and clangor unsubdued. Under the splintering silver of the electric lamps cones of light illuminate great spaces garishly and leave others in unbroken masses of shadow. Through bulkhead doors the red and gold of the furnaces chequer the reeking floor, and the tremulous roar of the caged fires dominates the sibilant splutter of the stream. Figures nearly naked, gritty and black with coal, and pasty with ashes, and soaked with sweat, come and go in the blazing light and in the half gloom, and seem like nightmares from fantastic tales of demonology.