Above a tiny little writing-desk fixed to the wall of the conning-tower there was a square mahogany board with six white buttons in pairs.

On one side of the board hung a telephone and on the other a speaking-tube.
To the right hand opposite where Zaidie stood were two nickel-plated wheels and behind each of them a white disc, one marked off into 360 degrees, and the other into 100 with subdivisions of tens.

Overhead hung an ordinary tell-tale compass, and compactly placed on other parts of the wall were barometers, thermometers, barographs, and, in fact, practically every instrument that the most exacting of aeronauts or Space-explorers could have asked for.
"You see, Zaidie, this is what one might call the cerebral chamber of the _Astronef_, and, granted that my engines worked all right, I could make her do anything I wanted without moving out of here, but as a rule, of course, Murgatroyd is in the engine-room.

If he wasn't the most whole-souled Wesleyan that Yorkshire ever produced, I believe he'd become an idolater and worship the _Astronef's_ engines." "And who is Murgatroyd, please ?" "In the first place he is what I might call an hereditary retainer of the House of Redgrave.

His ancestors have served mine for the last seven hundred years.