"Kipling, Rudyard - With the Night Mail" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kipling Rudyard)

enter the door amidships. Nothing here is for display. The inner skin of the
gas-tanks comes down to within a foot of my head and turns over just short of
the bilges. Liners and yachts disguise their tanks with decoration, but the
G.P.O. serves them raw under a lick of gray official paint. The inner skin shuts
off 50 feet of the bow and stern, but the bow-bulkhead is recessed for the
lift-shunting apparatus as the stern is pierced for the shaft-tunnels. The
engine-room lies almost amidships. Forward, extending to the bow tanks, is an
aperture--now a bottomless hatch--into which our coach will be locked. One looks
down over the coamings 300 feet to the dispatching-caisson whence voices boom
upward. Our coach rises thunderously on its guides, enlarging rapidly from
postage stamp to pontoon boat size. The two clerks, its crew, do not even look
up as it arrives. The Quebec letters fly under their fingers into docketed
racks, while both captains and Mr. Geary verify that the coach is locked home. A
clerk passes the waybill over the hatch-coaming. Captain Purnall thumb-marks and
passes it to Mr. Geary. Receipt has been given and taken. "Pleasant run," says
Mr. Geary, disappearing through the door which a foot-high pneumatic compressor
locks after him.
"A-ah!" sighs the compressor released. Our holding-down clips part with a tang.
We are clear.
Captain Hodgson opens the great colloid underbody porthole through which I watch
over-lighted London slide eastward as the gale grabs us. Then the first of the
low winter clouds cuts off the view and darkens Middlesex. On the south edge of
it I see a postal packet's light ploughing through the white fleece. She gleams
momentarily like a star ere dropping toward the Highgate Receiving Towers. "The
Bombay Mail," says Captain Hodgson, and looks at his watch. "She's 40 minutes
late."
"What's our level?" I ask.
"4,000. Aren't you coming up on the bridge?"
The bridge is dominated by a view of Captain Hodgson's legs where he stands in
the Control Platform that runs thwart-ships overhead. The bow colloid is
unshuttered and Captain Purnall, one hand on the wheel, is feeling for a fair
slant. The dial shows 4,300 feet.
"It's steep tonight," he mutters, as tier on tier of cloud drops under. "This
time o' year we generally pick up an easterly draft below 3,000. I hate
slathering through fluff."
"5,000--6,000--6,800"--the dip-dial reads ere we find the easterly drift,
heralded by a flurry of snow at the thousand fathom level. Captain Purnall rings
up the engines and keys down the governor on the switch before him. No sense
urging machinery when Aeolus gives you good knots for nothing! We are away in
earnest now--our nose notched home on our chosen star. At this level the lower
clouds are laid out, all neatly combed by the dry fingers of the East. Farther
below is the strong westerly blow through which we rose. Overhead, a film of
southerly drifting mist draws a theatrical gauze across the firmament. Moonlight
turns the lower strata to silver without a stain except our shadow. Bristol and
Cardiff Double Lights (those statelily-inclined beams over Severnmouth) are dead
ahead; for we keep the Southern Winter Route. Coventry Central, the pivot of the
English system, stabs upward every 10 seconds its spear of diamond light to the
north; and a point or two off our starboard bow The Leek, the great
cloud-breaker of Saint David's Head, swings its unmistakable green beam 25
degrees each way. There must be half a mile of fluff over it in this weather,