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Show 166 of stairs. They emerged at the ship's bow, on the deck beneath the pilot house. Karl hadn't paid attention earlier to the size of the Morgan, but now. he stared along her length to the silver-painted smokestack rising from the stern, a tenth of a mile away. During the hour that Karl had slept, the Morgan had moved to a different dock from the one where Andy and Karl boarded. She floated beneath a steel trestle that rose alongside her to a height of seventy feet and stretched to three times the length of the ship. On top of the trestle stood the line of gondola cars from the freight train they'd hopped in Canaan; Karl could read the P and LE markings on the sides. The bottoms of a dozen of the gondolas had been opened to spill coal from the cars into chutes that reached down into the ship's hold. The coal made such a racket cascading down the chutes -- about as loud as three simultaneous thunderstorms -- that Karl couldn't hear Andy, even when he yelled, so Andy just pointed to the deepening mounds of coal, widening his eyes to show his fascination. Drawn by the fury of the falling coal, Karl moved to the edge of the deck overlooking the hold. He stared spellbound as the mounds of coal rose out of their black dust, reaching toward him. No railing barricaded the deck from the hold -- a person could stand too close to the edge and fall twenty feet, be smothered and crushed beneath tons of unyielding blackness. The explosion of sound as the coal crashed into the hold drove thought from his mind, dulled his pain, hypnotized him. He leaned forward, balancing himself above the swelling mountain of coal, lulled by the thought-numbing violence. |