The inner skin of the gas-tanks comes down to within a foot or two of my head and turns over just short of the turn of the bilges. Liners and yachts disguise their tanks with decoration, but the G.P.O.
Even Fleury who begat it and, unlike Magniac, died a multi-millionaire, could not explain how the restless little imp shuddering in the U-tube can, in the fractional fraction of a second, strike the furious blast of gas into a chill greyish-green liquid that drains (you can hear it trickle) from the far end of the vacuum through the eduction-pipes and the mains back to the bilges. Here it returns to its gaseous, one had almost written sagacious, state and climbs to work afresh.
A cross swell had set in from the direction of Formosa Channel about ten o'clock, without disturbing these passengers much, because the Nan-Shan, with her flat bottom, rolling chocks on
bilges, and great breadth of beam, had the reputation of an exceptionally steady ship in a sea-way.
On his knees, he bored through the head of the first cask until the water rushed out upon the deck and flowed down into the bilge. He worked quickly, boring cask after cask down the alleyway that led to deeper twilight.
a ship of fools!" Dag Daughtry exulted; repeating what he had expressed in the hold, as he bored the last barrel, listened to the good water gurgling away into the bilge, and chuckled over his discovery of the Ancient Mariner on the same lay as his own.
"It ain't no use talkin'; bein' brothers to a rich dead man and representatives of furrin heirs that's got left is the line for you and me,
Bilge. Thish yer comes of trust'n to Providence.
"All right then; limpid, salubrious: no gush of
bilge water had turned it to fetid puddle.
Notwithstanding that its walls were blotched, as if missionary maps were bursting out of them to impart geographical knowledge; notwithstanding that its weird furniture was forlornly faded and musty, and that the prevailing Venetian odour of
bilge water and an ebb tide on a weedy shore was very strong; the place was better within, than it promised.
Changing barrel orientation so the
bilges face the forklift aisle was one key element.
The haul was allegedly discovered in a seawater tank in the
bilges of the vessel following intelligence from the UK and Portugal.
Richard Enser says that build-up of methane from rotting faeces in the
bilges of the ship might have been the real cause of the fire.