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There is something very sociable about smoke." He leant back and puffed great clouds into the air, filling the small den with an odour suggestive of bilge water and cemeteries. "Then again," he resumed after a pause, "take my claret. No, you don't like it." Three years ago, when I was living in Hammersmith, we caught two burglars with it.
The girl, closely attended by Sailor, sprang lightly upon the grating, and following with her eyes Leslie's pointing finger, gazed down into the blue, transparent depths, where she beheld the enormous black bulk of a large sperm whale, lying right up alongside the brig so close to her, indeed, that his starboard fin was right under her bilge, about a third of his length from his blow-holes aft toward his tail showing shiny as polished ebony, some six inches above water, while his ponderous tail stretched away some forty feet or more beyond the taffrail, where it could be clearly seen gently rising and falling to enable him to keep pace with the brig.
We are cut down from rail to bilge; there is a hole in our side big enough to drive a coach and six through, and the water is pouring into her like a sluice!" "And where is the steamer?" demanded the skipper. "She has backed out, and vanished in the fog," answered the mate. "My God! what an appalling mess," ejaculated the distracted skipper.
"She lies with a sharp list; sand's high up her starboard bilge. Engine-room doors jambed, but I found the stokehold grating and got some way down the ladder. Sand's washed down and buried the starboard bunkers. To clear out the stuff will be a long job." "Packed hard?" The diver nodded. "Like cement! I reckon the pump won't move it." Lister understood the captain's frown.
The day coming slowly brighter I observed on the bilge, among the big stones with which fisherfolk ballast their boats, several kegs and baskets, and a provision of fuel. All these were discharged upon the crag. The sun was not yet up when the boat moved away again, the noise of the oars on the thole-pins echoing from the cliffs, and left us in our singular reclusion.
"Fools! all fools! 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.
So long as the wind did not blow, and the sea did not rise, she was safe enough; but a swell that should force the hull to rise and fall would inevitably cause her to bilge. These facts were learned in five minutes after the yawl was in the water, and much did Raoul rejoice at having so promptly sent Ithuel in quest of the felucca.
"I don't want the ships to be bilge to bilge," said Howe to the officers of his flagship, the Queen Charlotte, "but if you can lock the yardarms, so much the better; the battle will be the quicker decided." The approach was leisurely, nearly in line abreast, on a course slightly diagonal to that of the enemy.
But I had time only for a momentary glance; the sloop had hung stationary in this position for just the barest perceptible space of time; then with a sudden jar she began to settle once more, and I had time only to scramble breathlessly along her wet and slippery sides and on to her bilge when she rolled fairly over and floated keel upwards.
All through the night those on deck did little else but stare at its increasing size, which when morning dawned again, was so great that the animal's bilge rode level with the ship's rail, while in her lee rolls it towered above the deck like a mountain. The final scene with it was now a question of minutes only, so most of us, fascinated by the strange spectacle, watched and waited.
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