176 SUBMAKINE CABLE LAYING AND REPAIRING. 



one of the author's sketches. This cable house, situated in. 

 a cocoa-nut plantation about 30 yards from the beach and six 

 miles from town, is of wood with raised floor, tiled roof, long 

 eaves and Venetian window shutters,, admirably suited to life 

 in the tropics. 



For day and night watch three of the stafi are generally 

 deputed to stay at the cable house and divide the duty in 

 eight hours each. Provisioning from town can generally be 

 arranged with the native servants daily, but a stock of tinned 

 foods of various kinds is always laid in as something certain 

 to go upon. Native fishermen will often come in with a good 

 catch from overnight, and some of this fish is soon to be 

 heard frizzling and sputtering on an extemporised stove for 

 breakfast. Bedding and mosquito nets are brought down and 

 rigged up, the nets being absolutely necessary from more 

 points of view than mosquitos. Ants, cockroaches, lizards, 

 and a choice variety of tropical insects would otherwise roam 

 unchecked across the sheet, and even with nets care has to 

 be taken daily to see that there is no centipede lurking under 

 the mattress. As to clothing, one knocks about in anything, 

 or rather the reverse of anything that carries any weight, full 

 dress being a suit of thin pyjamas or a baju and sarong a la 

 Malay. 



Reptiles as well as insects occasionally find their way into 

 the cable-house. On one occasion in Africa the author had 

 gone down with the superintendent to the cable-house, situated 

 seven miles from town and surrounded by low bush. On 

 entering the inner room the shutters were opened to let light 

 in and on moving a chair a deadly cobra was seen coiled up 

 under it. Its length, measured after killing, was a little under 

 four feet. 



An important part of the cable-house equipment is an auto- 

 matic lightning gaard. Land-lines, especially when aerial, are 

 fair game for lightning, and unless precautions are taken the 

 coils of the signalling instruments may be fused or the insula- 

 tion of the cable aflfected. The usual precaution taken when a 

 storm comes on is to put the cable to earth at the cable-house 

 (disconnecting it from the land-line), and the land-line to earth 

 at the town office. An arrangement has been devised by Mr. 

 J. C. Cufi^, of Singapore, by which the operation of disconnecting 



