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It makes three distinct sounds a rushing, a hissing, and a coughing or puffing sound; and if you stand on the brink and close your eyes it is no trick at all to imagine that you are sweeping down a river on a large low-pressure steamer, and that you hear the hissing of the steam about her boilers, the puffing from her escape-pipes and the churning rush of the water abaft her wheels.
The escape-pipes belched snowy pillars of steam aloft, the boat ground and surged and trembled and slid over into "M-a-r-k twain!" "Quarter-her " "Tap! tap! tap!" And away she went, flying up the willow shore, with the whole silver sea of the Mississippi stretching abroad on every hand. No Amaranth in sight! "Ha-ha, boys, we took a couple of tricks that time!" said the captain.
There was a strength-giving quality in the ozone, a brilliancy in the sunshine, and a tempered coolness in the air to be found nowhere else. There was, too, a certain picturesqueness in the sky-line of the houses a sky-line fringed with jets of white steam from the escape-pipes of numerous fires below, which appealed to his artistic sense.
As to the upper sides of the projectile, they were lined with a thick wadding of leather, put upon the best steel springs as supple as watch-springs. The escape-pipes hidden under this wadding were not even seen. All imaginable precautions for deadening the first shock having been taken, Michel Ardan said they must be made of "very bad stuff" to be crushed.
After midnight her slumbers were disturbed by the unusual creaking of the boat, and the hasty puffs of steam from the escape-pipes. She awoke, and was at once sensible of the immense pressure to which the boilers were subjected. Awhile she lay and listened to the ominous sounds which indicated the danger of the boat; then, much alarmed, she rose and dressed herself.
With never-ending screeching from their escape-pipes, all these boats crowded up in the long canal, as narrow as a ditch, which wound itself in a silvery line through the infinite sands. From his post on high he could see them as in a procession under a window, till disappearing in the plain.
But here, save for the immediate noises on the ship, which had already left her anchorage far behind, the shouting of the tug's escape-pipes, and the huge, swirling gushes from her powerful wheel, a sort of spectacular silence prevailed, and the sounds were like a part of this silence.
The escape-pipes belched snowy pillars of steam aloft, the boat ground and surged and trembled and slid over into "M-a-r-k twain!" "Quarter-her " "Tap! tap! tap!" And away she went, flying up the willow shore, with the whole silver sea of the Mississippi stretching abroad on every hand. No Amaranth in sight! "Ha-ha, boys, we took a couple of tricks that time!" said the captain.
Exactly the same amount of water, to the ounce, or even the teaspoonful, that is poured into the boiler of an engine, is given off through its funnel and escape-pipes in the form of steam; and precisely the same amount of water which we pour into our stomachs will reappear on the surface of the body again in the form of the vapor from the lungs, the perspiration from the skin, and the water from the kidneys.
But there was another peculiarity of the hollow way that was strangely impressed upon my memory that night namely, its power of acting as a vast speaking-tube, for if a person stood at one of the escape-pipes and whispered, his words were distinctly audible to another at the other pipe some fifty yards off, who could as easily respond.
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