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Updated: May 5, 2025
After a moment's hesitation you commence to grope your way upwards: the staircase sways and creaks beneath your feet; the air is heavy with strange odours; something, probably a cat scuttles past you and nearly upsets your balance; and putting out your hand to steady yourself your fingers touch something clammy and corpselike which turns out to be a Ghati labourer, naked save for a loin-cloth, asleep in the narrow niche between the walls of the ground-floor and the first storey.
Reared on horseback, and weak in the legs from long addiction to that mode of locomotion, this is a casus omissus in Lo's tactics. Scant time, however, has he for reflection. He gathers up himself and his drapery as well as circumstances will allow, and scuttles hurriedly off, a fluttering chaos of rags and feathers. It is too late. Heaven is on the side of the best artillery.
So saying he opened one of the scuttles, and a whiff of fresh air blew into the car. Thrusting his nose out, he sniffed cautiously for a while and then drew several long breaths. "It seems all right as regards quality," he remarked, "but there's too little body in it. We must wait until we get nearer the ground before we can go outside the car."
The drifter passed up a broad lane, on either side of which towered grey steel walls, unbroken by scuttles or embrasures; above them the muzzles of guns hooded by casemates and turrets, the mighty funnels, piled up bridges and superstructures, frowned down like the battlements of fortresses.
At length, as the lonely scientist sat there in the pilot-house, plunged in deep thought, and mechanically performing the simple operations necessary to enable him to alter the course of the ship from time to time, the mirror-like discs of the scuttles in the walls of the pilot-house gradually underwent a subtle change of colour from deepest black, through an infinite variety of shades of grey, to a pure, rich blue which, in its turn, merged into a delicate primrose hue, while the incandescent lamp in the dome-like roof of the structure as gradually lost its radiance until it became a mere white-hot thread in the growing flood of cold morning light.
The township had served as target to the German guns for many a long month, and was seriously amoché, as the saying goes. "Coal scuttles" by the hundred had ripped the tiles from almost every roof. Huge breaches gaped in other buildings, while some of them were completely levelled to the ground.
Then the female pretends to run away and the male runs after her with a queer appearance of anger, gets in front and stands facing her again; then she turns coyly round, but he, quicker and more active, scuttles round too, and seems to whip her with his antennae; then for a bit they stand face to face, play with their antennae, and seem to be all in all to one another."
It appeared that burglars had entered the block from the scuttles; that, being suddenly alarmed, they had quitted our house without committing any depredation, dropping even the boots they had collected in the halls; but that a desperate attempt had been made to force the till in the confectioner's shop on the corner, and that the glass show-cases had been ruthlessly smashed.
The natives wrap themselves up in their cloths or blankets at night, and lie down on the floors of their huts. Turning about, or getting up for water or tobacco, or perhaps to put fuel on the fire, they unluckily tread on a snake, or during sleep they roll over on one. The snake gives them a nip, and scuttles off.
All three berths were filled alike with lockers, hammocks, wash-stands, and so forth; and two of them were lighted by dirty little scuttles in the ship's side; but the third lay athwartships, and all the light that it received came from the cabin through its open door.
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