AN UNSINKABLE TITANIC
therefore in times of dire stress such as this, was well able to act as its own lifeboat until rescuing ships, summoned by wireless, should come to her aid.
The manner of the stricken ship's final plunge to the bottom may be readily gathered from the stories told by the survivors. As compartment after compartment was filled by overflow from the decks above, her bow sank deeper and her stern lifted high in the air, until the ship, buoyed up by her after compartments, swung almost vertically in the water like a gigantic spar buoy. In this unaccustomed position, her engines and boilers, standing out from the floor like brackets from a wall, tore loose from their foundations and crashed down into the forward part of the ship. Probably it was the muffled roar of this falling machinery that caused some of the survivors to imagine that they witnessed the bursting of boilers and the breaking apart of the hull. As a matter of fact, the shell of the Titanic went to the bottom practically intact. One by one the after compartments gave way, until the ship, weighted at her forward end with the wreckage of engine- and boiler-rooms, sank, straight as an arrow, to
[ 132 ]
