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Updated: June 10, 2025
It was just half-past nine o'clock, by my watch, when, bursting through the curtains of haze, our battle fleet hove in sight in the south-west quarter, with flags flying, the water leaping and foaming about their cutwaters, and a fine "white feather" of steam playing on the top of their waste-pipes, indicating that the stokers were maintaining a full head of steam in the boilers.
In this the whole of the pipes can be placed the soil-pipes, the lavatorium and plunge bath wastes, &c., and access gained to them by a manhole. By this means a cut-off could be effected between waste-pipes and the sewerage system. The culvert itself could be ventilated by connecting it with an extraction flue.
"Yes," he muttered to himself, "she is a liner, undoubtedly; and an X. and Z. boat at that, unless I am greatly mistaken. Two masts the mainmast stepped a long way aft; and two funnels amidships, pretty close together yes; she is an X. and Z.; I'll bet my hat on that. And she is steaming for all she is worth. I can see the `white feather' blowing away from the top of her waste-pipes.
On Pipman's side the waste-pipes stuck straight out of the wall, like wood-goblins grinning from the thicket with wide-open mouths, and long gray beards, which bred rose-pink earthworms, and from time to time fell with a heavy smack into the yard. Green hanging bushes grew out of holes in the wall.
The puddle wall is sixteen feet wide at starting, and diminishes to four feet at the top: so no water can creep in through our jacket." "But what are these apertures?" inquired Grotait. "Oh, those are the waste-pipes. They pass through the embankment obliquely, to the wear-dam: they can be opened, or shut, by valves, and run off ten thousand cubic feet of water a minute."
She was then only a few miles ahead, and stood out, a great mass of silver in the rays of the search-light, against the black background of the night, with the sea breaking over her. Through the telescope her people could be seen running about her decks, and steam was still blowing off through her waste-pipes, so, apparently, the water had not yet reached her engine-room.
Beeton would bring the meal when he had time to spare, and Dick learned to hang upon his speech, which dealt with badly fitted gas-plugs, waste-pipes out of repair, little tricks for driving picture-nails into walls, and the sins of the charwoman or the housemaids.
She stood on, evidently under a full head of steam, for we could see `the white feather' at the top of her waste-pipes, until she reached the Pinnacle Rock; and there they anchored and sank her.
The boat made a sharp half turn to larboard, and then shot off in its new direction like a thunderbolt. At the same moment the roaring noise of the water was completely drowned in a kind of shrill shriek such a sound as you might imagine given out by the waste-pipes of many thousand steam-vessels, letting off their steam all together.
The sounds that in summer bubbled up from its deep well-like shaft were silent now; the indistinguishable dripping of a hundred waste-pipes, that turned the court into a little well with green slimy walls, was silent too.
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