اوضاع دشوارتر میشه

CHAPTER TWO

Things get hotter

Once the Nan-Slum was out at sea, Captain MacWhirr looked at the barometer again. ‘Yes, there’s some really dirty weather out there, that’s for sure,’ he said to himself.

He was not worried by the way the weather was changing, and he didn’t feel at all afraid at the idea of a typhoon. Spending most of his life at sea, he knew many different kinds of weather; and a typhoon was just another kind of bad weather for him. But perhaps Captain MacWhirr did not fully know the real power of the sea.

Of course he knew about typhoons, and he knew that they sometimes happened in the China Sea. Before becoming a captain, he read about typhoons in books, and he heard about them from other sailors.

But to be in the middle of a very strong typhoon in which the sea showed all its fury and its terrible power - no. this was something that MacWhirr himself did not really know.

The swell was getting stronger, and the ship started rolling slowly and heavily from side to side. It was now late afternoon, and the sun was beginning to go down. It was very hot. there was no wind at all.

and MacWhirr could feel the storm in the air. Perhaps everyone on the Nan-Shan could feel it, because there was a heavy, angry feeling everywhere on the ship. Most of the Chinese labourers were on deck, spending the time in different ways

. Some were looking out to sea, bored. Some were smoking, and some had their shirts off and were pulling up buckets full of sea water from over the side of the ship to wash in because they were so hot. Three of them were pointing at one of their boxes and shouting.

Perhaps they were talking angrily about money, thought MacWhirr. The rest of them were sleeping quietly.

Below deck, it was worse. The temperature in the engine room was a hundred and seventeen degrees, and the air was full of angry voices and the loud noise of metal on metal. The second engineer, a big. strong man called Harry, was shouting at his men because there was not enough steam.

Harry often shouted, and usually the men worked quietly under him; but today they were as angry as he was. To make more steam, they needed more air from the ventilators - and there was none. Harry came up on deck to see why this was, and found Jukes.

‘How can my men give us enough steam if the ventilators aren’t catching the wind?’ he shouted.

‘The ventilators aren’t the problem.’ said Jukes. ‘There’s no wind - that’s the problem.’ Jukes knew that it was hard work in the engine room on a day like this, and so he decided it would be a good idea to let Harry shout for a while.

Perhaps after that, he would go back down below deck and do his job more quietly. But the second engineer didn’t listen to Jukes’s words.

‘Look, it’s just like I thought. This ventilator’s pointing in the wrong direction. I don’t know what your men do all day. Do they just lie around on their fat backs?’

He tried to change the direction of the ventilator, but it was too heavy to move. Jukes stopped him: ‘Harry, I told you before: there’s nothing that we can do. There’s no wind. But look, there’s a storm coming.’ Harry looked at the strong swell of the sea around them, and then at Jukes. ‘This is a dog’s life.’ he said, angrily. And with that, he went back down to the engine room.

Jukes turned round, and saw MacWhirr looking at him.

‘Why did you let him talk to you like that?’ the captain asked. ‘You mustn’t be soft with the crew. If he goes on like that, he’ll have to find himself a new job on another ship very soon.’

‘His men can’t make enough steam. And it’s not easy working down there when it’s so hot, I understand how he feels. Even up here on deck I feel like I have a blanket round my head.’

A blanket round your head? What do you mean? Have you ever had a blanket round your head, Jukes? What was that for?’

‘It’s just a way of speaking, sir,’ said Jukes, thinking that Captain MacWhirr really had a very strange way of understanding things.

‘Well, if there’s any more talk of that kind from the second engineer, he’ll have to go,’ said MacWhirr, and he walked away.

At eight o’clock it was dark. Jukes went to the chart-room to write the ship’s log. As he did every day, he wrote the number of miles, the direction the ship was sailing in, and what kind of wind there was that day. Should he write down what he thought, or only what he could see?

Under ‘Comments’ he wrote: ‘Terribly hot weather,’ and: ‘The swell is making the ship roll heavily.’ He thought for one or two minutes, and then wrote: ‘The Chinese labourers are all safely below deck for the night.

The barometer is still going down.’ He was closing the log, when the ship rolled very heavily He looked out of the window. In front of his eyes a great big dark wave climbed up higher and higher until it hid the starry sky. He wrote one more comment in the log: ‘From what I can see, a typhoon is on its way.’