I was upon a case as he spoke, and I answered at once; but to my annoyance this only drew forth fresh knockings in various ways—two knocks together, then two more very quickly—a regular rat-rat—and then all kinds of variations, to which I replied as well as I could, and then left off in a pet.
“Who’s going to keep on doing that?” I cried angrily. “They must wait.”
“Yes,” growled Barney; “I’d go on, sir. That arn’t doing nobody no good.”
The consequence was that I went forward slowly, with an accompaniment of taps, which kept irritating me in that hot, stifling passage—no, it is not fair to call such a place a passage, seeing that it was merely an opening formed by the settling down of the packages, or their opening out from the rolling of the ship in the storm.
I was passing along one of these latter portions with great care when a cold chill ran through me, for the thought came—suppose the ship heels over now, I shall be nipped in here and crushed to death.
But the ship did not heel over; though I did not feel comfortable till I was out of the opening, and flat once more on the top of a huge crate, between whose openings, the sharp ends of the straw used in packing it projected and scratched my face. Here I paused to listen to Barney panting and grunting as he struggled along.
“Mustn’t make quite so much noise, sir,” he whispered; “or some ’un uppards ’ll be hearing of us.”
He was more careful, and I once more went crawling laboriously, and finding on the whole so little room that I began to think I must have gone much farther than Barney had been before. And there was a strange thing connected with that creep over and amongst the cargo. Time seemed to be indefinitely prolonged. I could fancy one moment that I had been crawling and crawling for hours, and going a tremendous distance, while the next my idea was that I had hardly moved and not been there a minute. Every now and then, in spite of setting my teeth hard, and even biting my tongue, that horrible feeling of fright came back; and I have often asked myself since whether I was an awful coward. But I never could give a fair judgment, for I have thought that most people would have felt the same, whether they were lads or grown men, and certainly my three companions in talking it over said it upset them more than going in for a real fight.
It was curious, too, how busy one’s brain was when I could keep from thinking of being smothered or crushed, or so fixed in that I could not get out. For then I began to think about moles burrowing underground, and worms in their holes, and rabbits and mice; and on one of these occasions I started and wondered at the peculiarity of the coincidence, for I suddenly became aware of a peculiar, half-musky smell, and then there was a scuffling, squealing sound which sent a shudder through me.
“Hear the rats, sir?” whispered Barney; but I was so upset that I couldn’t reply.