"Rather!" said Bert appreciatively, though he had not the ghost
of an idea what these phrases meant.

Little electric lights could be switched on up there if anything
went wrong in the night. There were even ladders across the
space. "But you can't go into the gas," protested Bert.
"You can't breve it."

The lieutenant opened a cupboard door and displayed a diver's
suit, only that it was made of oiled silk, and both its
compressed-air knapsack and its helmet were of an alloy of
aluminium and some light metal. "We can go all over the inside
netting and stick up bullet holes or leaks," he explained.
"There's netting inside and out. The whole outer-case is rope
ladder, so to speak."

Aft of the habitable part of the airship was the magazine of
explosives, coming near the middle of its length. They were all
bombs of various types mostly in glass--none of the German
airships carried any guns at all except one small pom-pom (to use
the old English nickname dating from the Boer war), which was
forward in the gallery upon the shield at the heart of the eagle.

From the magazine amidships a covered canvas gallery with
aluminium treads on its floor and a hand-rope, ran back
underneath the gas-chamber to the engine-room at the tail; but
along this Bert did not go, and from first to last he never saw
the engines. But he went up a ladder against a gale of
ventilation--a ladder that was encased in a kind of gas-tight