Page:The Great Secret.djvu/39

Rh the dining saloon, capable of seating four hundred guests with ease.

The music saloon was a gorgeous chamber of carved walnut panelled walls, and arranged like a conservatory with palm and fern trees. The smoke-room was a marble and gold hall, specially adapted to the comfort of the devotees of the Goddess Nicotine, particularly suited with its cool slabs for the Tropics.

The gangways ran without partitions between the saloon and the second cabin, and from there to the steward and seamen's quarters, thus the second passengers occupied the point of vantage between the employees and the saloon passengers; in fact, although fewer in number, they commanded the ship, and it was this portion that the suspected passengers at present occupied.

Down below, vast hordes of firemen, stokers, and engineers worked in an atmosphere of heat and suffocating closeness, that to outsiders it was hardly possible for suffering humanity to exist. Many died from heat-apoplexy each voyage these ocean liners made. Half a dozen men had already been carried up and flung overboard since the vessel had left port—Africans these were, so that little heed was paid to them. No European could have existed in these nethermost hells, where, like swart demons, the black men worked in a state of nakedness. Upstairs all was luxury and comfort, down here all was misery and suffering, still the pistons drove up and down, and the fairy globes of light shone soft and steadfast, while the fear that gripped at the hearts of the luxury-lapped ones also tugged at the vitals of the wretched slaves below.

Viewing the modern ironclad, whether destined for war, freightage or transfer, the romancist and artist,