“She touched bottom,” I explained, furious at even the prospect of a further delay in getting my story to the cable.
“That’s funny,” mused the engineer, slipping on the belated boot in a hurry. “It surely felt like sliding over a mud bank. We must be ten miles from shore at least. But it can’t be, for the old man hasn’t even slowed her down. We must have dreamed it.”
“Nothing of the sort,” I replied, having been there many times before. “We are too near the shore, and the skipper’s either drunk or asleep. I am going on deck,” and I got up and put on my coat and started for the stairs.
I had barely put my foot on the bottom step when we felt the sudden check to our speed and that subtle velvety sensation of a ship sliding through mud. I turned and looked at the engineer, who was at my heels.
“The fool,” he muttered, and then a lot of Greek expletives which sounded good to me. “He’s piled her up on the mud bank.”
And even as he spoke there came the frantic clanging of the telegraph in the engine room, and almost instantly the dying pulse of the engines as the chief engineer shut off the steam. The pistons had been slipping merrily up and down in their guides driving the shaft at its maximum, and for a few strokes their impetus carried them, but the life was gone, and after a few half-hearted revolutions they came to a sullen standstill, the high pressure engine just at the end of its reach and the low caught in the middle of its stroke. The absolute silence was broken only by the lap of the waves breaking on our steel sides. In a moment I was on the bridge with Morris at my heels. A tumult of Greek voices in the wheel-house told of the endeavors to adjust the responsibility of the blunder. It is always so with the Greeks. In an emergency they all begin to quarrel as to who is to blame. So it was at this juncture, and until I had Stomati translating some strong Anglo-Saxon language, the idea of how we were going to get afloat again did not seem to have crossed any one’s mind. They all united in condemning Spero as the simplest way out of the matter, and let it go at that.
It was almost full moon. The wind had gone down, and for once the sea was as calm as a lake. Four or five miles away, dead ahead, a light glimmered, and with my night glasses I could see the outline of the low lying shore against the sky. It was way below zero—a dead, cold calm, the sort of cold that hurts one’s lungs to breathe.
As we stood arguing on the bridge the safety valves on the starboard boilers lifted and the steam deflected from the engines came roaring out of the steam pipe aft the funnel, going straight up into the cold air in great expanding clouds of fleece.
Old man Gileti rang full speed astern and eagerly the three cylinders breathed again as they took up their triple chorus down in the engine room. For an hour they worked, first ahead and then astern in a frantic effort to slip her out of the bank. But it was no use. We had been driving at nearly fourteen knots and had gone head-first into a wet and sticky bank of mud, and her nose was buried three feet deep in the clinging mess.
I got the chief down into my saloon as being the only rational man aboard, and together we studied out our position on the chart. We were some 15 miles north of the Danube’s mouth and four miles off shore. The skipper had mistaken a light in a house for the harbor light, and had turned in for the shore just an hour too soon. The names we devised to apply to that skipper would have frozen his marrow could they have been translated. The little engineer had been moving heaven and earth to give me speed, and he almost wept at the delay. I told him that I must be at the cable office by seven in the morning, and to pass the word forward to the crew that if they did not get her off by three o’clock I should lower the boat and take four men to pull me to the shore. The idea of a four-mile sea-pull with the mercury freezing put more life into the crew than I could have believed possible. I told Morris that he would have to go, too, and his teeth chattered in anticipation as he flew forward to Stomati to get him to urge the crew into action.