He was still standing there when the lamp burned low, flickered and went out.
The darkness was soon unbearable with heat; and Keighley put down his hammer and began to strip himself to his underclothes and rubber boots. He could hear the men tearing at their woolen underwear as they ripped it off. Someone was singing a German ballad in a shrill nasal whine.
Suddenly there was an outbreak of oaths. “Shine” had begun to curse. Having arrived at an insane notion that Keighley had penned them all in there, he was promising himself an indescribable revenge if he ever escaped. He kicked out at Cripps—who had torn the bandage from his mouth to get more imaginary beer, and was gurgling to himself over it—and that started a confusion of crazy voices and weak complaints. A man crawled over Sturton and screamed when “Turk” seized him by the throat, struggling, with an uproar that set all bedlam loose. The men began to fight, clutching at one another, rolling about with feeble blows, writhing like eels baked alive in an oven, like the lost souls in old pictures of hell. “Shine” leaped on Keighley and went down under a blow that almost split his forehead. The place was a pandemonium—awful—indescribable....
Fifteen minutes later the silence of exhaustion had settled down on hoarse breathings and low groans. And Captain Keighley, sitting with his back to the door—his knees drawn up, his head resting on them, nauseated—was struggling against a whirling lapse of consciousness.
IV
THE fire on the Sachsen had been discovered when the freight-handlers returned to work after their midday meal. All that afternoon the boat burned and drifted; and by nightfall she was beached, on the Jersey mudflats, with her paint peeled off her sides, her funnels blackened, her upper works a skeleton of blistered metal, lying, grey and hot, like a smoking fire-log, and steaming where the streams from the tugs and fire-boats struck her.
The Hudson had followed her, with Deputy-Chief Moran in charge, the remnants of Keighley’s crew working desperately to drown out the fire. They had given up all hope of saving Keighley and the men who were with him, but they did not give up the appearance or the efforts of hope, although there had not been a sound or a sight of life on the Sachsen for eight hours, now, and she was slowly settling with the tons of water that were being poured into her cargo holds.
“It’s no use,” Moran said, with the coming of darkness—and relinquished even the pretence of the possibility of a rescue.