No one lifted up his voice in rejoicing, for there were dead and injured back in the shadows; there were grief-stricken, anxious men and women crouching out there in the sunshine; there were limp, unconscious women and half-dead children; and over all still hung the ominous cloud of catastrophe fat with prophecies of perils yet to come.
They had gone out from a ship filled with a monstrous clangour and confusion, they were returning to a tomblike hulk, a lonely mass in which echoes would abound, a thing of sighs and silences, the corpse of a mammoth that had throbbed yesterday,--but never more.
Up in the curving triangle of the forward deck were two long, canvas-covered rows.

The dead! Forty-six twisted, silent forms lying side by side, some calm in death, others charred and mutilated beyond all possibility of identification.

Every man in the engine-room at the time of the explosion was now a mangled, unrecognizable thing.
Engineers, electricians, stokers,--all of them wiped out in the flash of an eye,--burnt, boiled, shattered.

Half a dozen women, as many children, lay with the silent men.
The injured had been placed in staterooms on the promenade deck, regardless of previous occupancy or subsequent claim.

There lay the score and a half of seriously injured, and there toiled the ship's surgeon and his volunteer helpers.