Someone Raised The Cover Of A Vat, And Peering Down Into The Opening We Saw A Small, Vicious Engine Hard At Work, Entirely Enveloped In Twisty, Coily, Stewy Depths Of Black Oil, Like A Devil-Fish Writhing In Sea-Ooze And Cuttle-Juice.

So then we descended another mile or two to an inferno, full of naked, sooty devils forever feeding sulphurous

Pitfires in the nethermost parlors of the damned; but they said this was the stokehole; and I was in no condition to argue with them, for I had suddenly begun to realize that I was far from being a well person. As one peering through a glass darkly, I saw one of the attendant demons sluice his blistered bare breast with cold water, so that the sweat and grime ran from him in streams like ink; and peering in at a furnace door I saw a great angry sore of coals all scabbed and crusted over. Then another demon, wielding a nine-foot bar daintily as a surgeon wields a scalpel, reached in and stabbed it in the center, so that the fire burst through and gushed up red and rich, like blood from a wound newly lanced.

I had seen enough and to spare; but my guide brought me back by way of the steerage, in order that I might know how the other half lives. There was nothing here, either of smell or sight, to upset the human stomach - third class is better fed and better quartered now on those big ships than first class was in those good old early days - but I had held in as long as I could and now I relapsed.

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