The Queen looked. Her eyes were well accustomed now to the dim light. She saw.
There in the depths of the mysterious cavern, it would not have surprised the girl to see strange things. She would scarcely have been astonished if Kalliope had pointed to a group of mermaids combing damp hair with long curved shells. Old Triton with his wreathed horn would have been in place, almost an expected vision, if he had sat on a throne of rock, sea carved, with panting dolphins at his feet. The Queen saw no such beings. What she did see called from her a little cry of surprise, made her cling suddenly to Kalliope’s arm.
“Oh!” she said. “Oh, Kalliope, what are they?”
“Damn boxes,” said Kalliope.
Before the eyes of the Queen, stretching along the back of the cave, was a long row of large galvanized iron tanks, strongly made, with heavily studded seams, each with a great copper tap. They were ranged in a most orderly line, like some grey monsters carefully drilled. They were all exactly the same width, the same height, and the copper spouts exactly matched each other.
“Damned boxes,” said Kalliope cheerfully.
Any one looking at them might almost have agreed with her. They were not precisely boxes. They were cisterns, tanks, but they gave the impression of being damnable and damned.
“But,” said the Queen, “what are they for? What’s the meaning of them? How did they get here? Who brought them?”
Kalliope did not understand the questions, but guessed at what her mistress asked. She had been learning English for three days only. She had been quick to pick up certain words from the Queen, words in frequent use between them. But in face of questionings like these the vocabulary of millinery and hair dressing failed her hopelessly. She fell back on what she had picked up from the sailors’ lips and from her brothers who were already enriching the island language with English slang.
“Blighters,” she said, “mucky ship—go row, go row—damn boxes.”