Ebenezer Smith and his confrères worked in the testing-room like Trojans. They connected and disconnected; they put in stops and took them out; they intensified currents to the extent of their anxieties they reduced them to the measure of their despair—nothing would do. The cable was apparently dead. In these circumstances picking-up was the only resource, and the apparatus for that purpose was again rigged up in the bows.
In the meantime the splice which had been made to connect the tanks was cut and examined, and the portions coiled in the fore and main tanks were found to be perfect—alive and well—but the part between ship and shore was speechless.
So was poor Robin Wright! After Mr Field—whose life-hope seemed to be doomed to disappointment—the blow was probably felt most severely by Robin. But Fortune seemed to be playfully testing the endurance of these cable-layers at that time, for, when the despair was at its worst, the tell-tale light reappeared on the index of the galvanometer, without rhyme or reason, calling forth a shout of joyful surprise, and putting an abrupt stoppage to the labours of the pickers-up!
They never found out what was the cause of that fault; but that was a small matter, for, with restored sensation in the cable-nerve, renewed communication with the shore, and resumed progress of the ship towards her goal, they could afford to smile at former troubles.
Joy and sorrow, shower and sunshine, fair weather and foul, was at first the alternating portion of the cable-layers.
“I can’t believe my eyes!” said Robin to Jim Slagg, as they stood next day, during a leisure hour, close to the whirling wheels and never-ending cable, about 160 miles of which had been laid by that time. “Just look at the Terrible and Sphinx; the sea is now so heavy that they are thumping into the waves, burying their bows in foam, while we are slipping along as steadily as a Thames steamer.”
“That’s true, sir,” answered Slagg, whose admiration for our hero’s enthusiastic and simple character increased as their intimacy was prolonged, and whose manner of address became proportionally more respectful, “She’s a steady little duck is the Great Eastern! she has got the advantage of length, you see, over other ships, an’ rides on two waves at a time, instead of wobblin’ in between ’em; but I raither think she’d roll a bit if she was to go along in the trough of the seas. Don’t the cable go out beautiful, too—just like a long-drawn eel with the consumption! Did you hear how deep the captain said it was hereabouts?”
“Yes, I heard him say it was a little short of two miles deep, so it has got a long way to sink before it reaches its oozy bed.”
“How d’ee know what sort o’ bed it’s got to lie on?” asked Slagg.
“Because,” said Robin, “the whole Atlantic where the cable is to lie has been carefully sounded long ago, and it is found that the ocean-bed here, which looks so like mud, is composed of millions of beautiful shells, so small that they cannot be distinguished by the naked eye. Of course, they have no creatures in them. It would seem that these shell-fish go about the ocean till they die, and then fall to the bottom like rain.” See note one.