After A
Heated Interval The Crew Took To The Desert Alongside, While The Captain
And The Mate Opened All Cocks And Sank Her, Not In The Fairway But Up
Against A Bank, Just Leaving Room For A Steamer To Squeeze Past.
Then
the Canal authorities wired to her charterers to know exactly what there
might be in her; and it is said that the reply kept them awake of
nights, for it was their business to blow her up.
Meantime, traffic had to go through, and a P. & O. steamer came along.
There was the Canal; there was the sunken wreck, marked by one elderly
Arab in a little boat with a red flag, and there was about five foot
clearance on each side for the P. & O. She went through a-tiptoe,
because even fifty tons of dynamite will jar a boat, perceptibly, and
the tramp held more - very much more, not to mention detonators. By some
absurd chance, almost the only passenger who knew about the thing at the
time was an old lady rather proud of the secret.
'Ah,' she said, in the middle of that agonised glide, 'you may depend
upon it that if everybody knew what, I know, they'd all be on the other
side of the ship.'
Later on, the authorities blew up the tramp with infinite precautions
from some two miles off, for which reason she neither destroyed the Suez
Canal nor dislocated the Sweet Water Canal alongside, but merely dug out
a hole a hundred feet or a hundred yards deep, and so vanished from
Lloyd's register.
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