But what a change from when he was last here!
Then sights so ghastly that he dared not recall them: screams of torn men, rending of torn planks; howling terrors on every side, shattering his head, bursting his heart, dissipating his mind.
Now silence everywhere, beautiful silence, the silence of Death.
And those leaping devils with the hoarse throats, who had barked themselves red-hot then, were strangely hushed now. Loosed from their moorings, they huddled, together beneath him half under water, like so many great black beasts, cowed, it seemed, almost ashamed; here a huge breech showing, there a blunt snout, and again a thrusting trunnion.
As he crawled along in the gloom among blackened corpses he thanked God for the stillness. It was comforting to him as water in the desert to a man dying. He drank it in gulps.
A sound in the darkness and silence stopped him.
Out of the deeps a shuddering voice rose up to him, mumbling a Litany of the dead,
"Lord ha mercy on me a sinner—
Lord ha mercy on me a sinner—
Lord ha mercy on me a sinner."
The boy crept to the forehatch and peered down.
One tiny yellow star flickered in the pitch blackness beneath.