Meanwhile preparations were being made to shell the hilltop from the guns of the cruiser which had been warped across the harbour. Her guns could not at first be elevated sufficiently to reach the top of the hill, but they were overcoming this difficulty by letting water into her on one side and giving her a list to starboard, and thus tilting her gun muzzles still farther upward.
Hunter and Cummins were anxiously watching this operation—necessarily a slow one—and it was not completed before Gibbins rushed across to them and reported the Krupp ready for action.
"We'll weigh in first, old chap!" Hunter exclaimed with glee.
A great shell, grooved and lead-coated to take the rifling, was hoisted out of the magazine, the derrick raised it to the breech, a dozen men shoved it home with a long rammer, a quarter charge of powder-bags followed it, the clumsy breech-block was slowly worked across, Gibbins sprang up to the sighting-platform and jammed in the friction-tube with its lanyard, and all was ready.
Cummins coolly examined everything till he was satisfied that nothing was wrong with gun or mounting, and then the ponderous mass of steel was laboriously trained towards the spot where lay the cruiser under the cliffs, at the opposite side of the harbour. From the sighting-platform not even her masts could be seen, and the direction had to be roughly found by means of rifle cleaning-rods stuck in a line on the edge of the intervening plateau.
Clumsy this method was, but the best available.
Cummins grasped the lanyard, the gun's crew were ordered out of the pit in case of accident, the marines, lying behind the breast-work at the edge of the plateau and in front of the gun, were cleared out of danger, and he gave it a sharp tug.
A huge cloud of smoke, a huge, bellowing roar, cubes of burning gunpowder leapt down the side of the hill, some or the sand-bags were blown over the crest, the muzzle of the gun cocked itself into the air as the gun recoiled along its slides and then gently slid forward again. Everyone rushed to the edge to see where the shell fell. Half a minute of breathless anxiety, heedless of the bullets that were flying past, and then, up on the cliffs, behind the cruiser, a balloon-shaped mass of white smoke burst out, masses of rock leapt into the air and fell splashing into the sea, and the roaring of the explosion tossed from hill to hill, and, crashing from cliff to cliff with tremendous reverberations, came up to them like thunder.
"Their game is up," shouted Hunter. "Cheer, men, cheer!"
Cummins, a quaint little rain-soaked figure, standing on the parapet of sand-bags behind the gun, and with the lanyard still in his hand, simply chuckled: "You can load again, men, she is quite safe."