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Updated: May 4, 2025
As she was passing, so near that we could have leaped aboard her, Lieutenant Wood trained the stern-gun on her when she was only twenty yards from its muzzle and delivered a rifle-pointed shell which dislodged the iron logs sheltering the Monitor's conning-tower, carrying away the steering-gear and signal apparatus, and blinding Captain Worden.
Nature has been kind; she has surrounded us with natural ray-filters of protection." His voice now seemed issuing from a kind of vacancy. Save for a slight darkening of the air, nothing was visible of him. He went on: "With our limited senses we are, in a way, merely peeping out of little slits in an armored conning-tower of life, out at the stupendous vibratory battles of the cosmos.
He reduced the speed to thirty knots, rose for a moment till the conning-tower was just above the water, took his bearings, sank, called for full speed, and in four minutes the ram crashed into the Alger's stern, carried away her sternpost and rudder, and smashed her propellers. The Ithuriel passed on as if she had hit a log of wood and knocked it aside.
"I shouldn't think of opening the ball without your ladyship's presence," laughed Arnold in reply, and then he went and called Natas and his attendant and the Professor before going to the conning-tower, where in a very few minutes he was joined by Natasha. The first words she said were "I have told Ivan to send us some coffee as soon as he has attended to my father.
Natasha filled a cup and passed it to him, and he went on "You remember what I said to Tremayne in the Princess's sitting-room at Petersburg about the eagle and the crows just before the trial of the Tsar's first war-balloon. Well, if you like to spend a couple of hours with me in the conning-tower as soon as it is dark enough for us to descend, I will show you what I meant then.
Now you stand up there on that step so that you can see all round, and watch with all your eyes, because you are going to see something that no woman ever saw before." Above a tiny little writing-desk fixed to the wall of the conning-tower there was a square mahogany board with six white buttons in pairs. On one side of the board hung a telephone and on the other a speaking-tube.
The next moment Murgatroyd put his head up through the companion-way which led from the upper deck to the conning-tower, and said, in a tone whose calm indicated, as usual, resignation to the worst that could happen: "My Lord, two of those beasts, fishes or live balloons, or whatever they are, have come across the propellers.
The conning-tower was filled with gas and smoke; but Captain Blake, though burned and nearly stripped of clothing by the blast of flame, was uninjured by the flying fragments of the shell. Smarting, gasping, and choking, fully aware of the complete destruction above, his mind dwelt for an instant on the man who had once saved his life, whom he had sentenced to death.
The cruiser burst into a thunderstorm of smoke and flame and shell, but there was nothing to shoot at. Only three feet of freeboard would have been visible even in broad daylight. The signal mast had been telescoped. There was nothing but the deck, the guns and the conning-tower to be seen.
The most magnificent spectacle that Colston had ever seen in his life, or, for the matter of that, ever dreamed of, was the one that he saw from the conning-tower of the Ariel while the sun was rising over the vast plain of mingled land and water which stretched away to the eastward until it melted away into the haze of early morning.
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