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The large ones, which are a very great trouble to build, and which are kept in sheds constructed specially for them, are twenty-six feet long, two and a half wide, and four deep. They are furnished with gimbals, the cross-pieces being connected by a rafter.
Lying flat and craning my neck into the hole, I saw, far over on the other side of the ship, the flicker of a lantern upon boxes. I immediately drew back, got to my feet, and extinguished the lamp in the gimbals. Then I snatched a blanket from the steward's bunk, and spread it across the hole. That done, there was no danger of light or draught betraying us to the man below.
Even a barometer which had hung near the closet had been wrenched away, as I could tell by the broken brass gimbals still fast to the brass supports; but this was a matter of no importance, since I had noticed another in good order in the cabin to say nothing of the fact that my powerlessness to make any provision against bad weather made me indifferent to warnings of coming storms.
There were the tell-tale compass, the sea-lamps in their gimbals, the blue-backed charts carelessly rolled and tucked away, the signal-flags in alphabetical order, and a mariner's dividers jammed into the woodwork to hold a calendar. At last I was living. Here I sat, inside my first ship, a smuggler, accepted as a comrade by a harpooner and a runaway English sailor who said his name was Scotty.
Other people, women among them, had unavoidably crossed his deck, but they had been patently alien, momentary; but Millie, with her still delight at the yacht's compact comfort, her intuitive comprehension of its various details the lamps set in gimbals, the china racks and chart cases slung overhead entered at once into the spirit of the craft that was John Woolfolk's sole place of being.
Rat responded with a playful nip of his sharp little teeth. "I'm taking the morning off," Kandin continued. "You can't imagine how nice it's going to be to sit around doing nothing while everyone else is working, for a change." "What's the landing hour?" "Precisely 1753 tonight. It's all been worked out. We actually are in the landing orbit now, though the ship's gimbals keep you from feeling it.
The craft was not a regular Indiaman that is to say, she was not one of the Honourable East India Company's ships, but, for all that, she was a very handsome and comfortable vessel, and her cuddy was most luxuriously fitted up with crimson velvet sofas, capacious revolving armchairs screwed to the deck alongside the tables, a very fine piano, with a quantity of loose music on the top of it, some very handsome pictures in heavy gold frames screwed to the ship's side between the ports, a magnificent hanging lamp suspended from the centre of the skylight, with a number of smaller lamps, hung in gimbals, over the pictures, a handsome fireplace, with a wide tiled hearth, now filled with pots of plants, a capacious sideboard against the fore bulkhead, a handsome carpet on the deck, and, in fact, everything that could be thought of, within reason, to render a long sea voyage comfortable and pleasant.
The lighted sea-lamps swung and leaped in their gimbals, ever battling with the dancing shadows in the murky gray. The wood-work creaked and groaned. The jiggermast, a huge cylinder of hollow steel that perforated the apartment through deck above and floor beneath, was hideously vocal with the storm. Far above, taut ropes beat against it so that it clanged like a boiler-shop.
The place was lighted by a small skylight in the deck, and two ports, or scuttles, on each side. At one end of the skylight was screwed a clock, while to the other end was screwed a mercurial barometer hung in gimbals; and immediately over the chair at the fore end of the table hung a tell-tale compass.
Day after day we lay in our narrow berths, too sick to read, too unhappy to talk, watching the cabin lamp as it swung uneasily in its well-oiled gimbals, and listening to the gurgle and swash of the water around the after dead-lights, and the regular clank, clank of the blocks of the try-sail sheet as the rolling of the vessel swung the heavy boom from side to side.
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