Page:Ballantyne--The Battery and the Boiler.djvu/385

 a huge yawning pit, twenty-five feet deep, lighted by numerous swinging lamps like a subterranean church, with its hands, like Lilliputians, attending to the last coil of the cable. That coil or layer was full four miles long, but it would soon run out, therefore all was in readiness. The captain was giving directions in a low voice, and seeing that every one was in his place. The chiefs of the engineers and electricians were on the alert. Every few minutes a deep voice from below announced the number of "turns" before the last one. At last the operation was successfully accomplished and the danger past, and the cable was soon running out from the fore-tank as smoothly as it had run out of the other.

The tendency of one flake or coil of cable to stick to the coil immediately below, and produce a wild irremediable entanglement before the ship could be stopped, was another danger, but these and all other mishaps of a serious nature were escaped, and the unusually prosperous voyage was brought to a close on the 27th of February, when the Great Eastern reached Aden in a gale of wind—as if to remind the cable-layers of what might have been—and the cable was cut and buoyed in forty fathoms water.

The continuation of the cable up the Red Sea, the successful termination of the great