"Stop her—stop her—hard over your wheel—hard over——"
His voice ended in a vibrating screech that sounded wild, weird, uncanny in that awful silence. A hundred men stopped in their stride, or work, paralyzed at the tones coming from the bridge.
And then came the impact.
With a grinding, smashing roar as of thousands of tons coming together, the huge liner plunged headlong into the iceberg that rose grim and silent right ahead, towering over her in spite of her great height. The shock was terrific, and the grinding, thundering crash of falling tons of ice, coupled with the rending of steel plates and solid planks, made chaos of all sound.
The Admiral bit in, dug, plowed, kept on going, going, and the whole forward part of her almost disappeared into the wall of white. A thousand tons of huge flakes slammed and slid down her decks, burying her to the fore hatch in the smother. A thousand tons more crashed, slid, and plunged down the slopes of the icy mountain and hurled themselves into the sea with giant splashes, sending torrents of water as high as the bridge rail. The men who had been forward were swept away by the avalanche. Many were never seen again. And then, with reversed engines, she finally came to a dead stop, with her bows jammed a hundred feet deep in the ice wall of the berg.
After that it was panic. All discipline seemed to end in the shock and struggle. Brownson howled and stormed from the bridge, and Smith shouted orders and sprang down to enforce them. The chief mate came on deck in his underclothes and passed the word to man the boats. A thousand passengers jammed the companionway and strove with panic and inhuman fury to reach the deck.
One man clad in a night robe gained the outside of the press, and, running swiftly along the deck, flitted like a ghost over the rail, and disappeared into the sea. He had gone crazy, violently insane in the panic.
Brownson tied down the siren cord, and the roar shook the atmosphere. The tremendous tones rose above the din of screaming men and cursing seamen; and then the master called down to the heart of the ship, the engine room.
"Is she going?" he asked.
"Water coming in like through a tunnel," came the response. "Nearly up to the grates now——"