Lifeboats were wired or glued to the deck with layers of paint, cork in the life jackets had turned to dust with age and fire hoses broke under water pressure.
Emily Wilson wipes the dust of ages from Homer's prose in her new translation of The Odyssey.
Of the exodus, he writes: "Rattling and wheezing, coated with dust, the aging vehicles swayed under loads they were not designed to bear.
And then, after a good five minutes of plowing through the dust of ages, Roomba shut off and sounded the plaintive notes that mean "mission abandoned".
At the far end of the house's paintings-crammed ground floor, beyond McKellen's writing desk, is a dormer window, and beyond the window, no more than twenty feet away, the murky Thames rolls by, carrying the dust of ages.
She always overestimated the popularity of Cox and herself, and she underestimated the force of religion in Iraqi affairs and the Shia clergy "sitting in an atmosphere which reeks of antiquity and is so thick with the dust of ages that you can't see through it - nor can they".
Nasa recently issued guidelines to protect the Apollo 11 and 17 landing sites, describing them as "off-limits", including "close proximity limits for ground-travel and no-fly zones to avoid spraying rocket exhaust or dust onto ageing but historic equipment".
The air is a fusion of dust and aged wood.
All three wore shop aprons and the fine dust of aged, hand-picked Bavarian and Bosnian spruce and maple.
The parking lot at the golf course began filling by evening — a procession of raised trucks coated in backcountry dust, an aging red Honda with a "Forever Stoked" bumper sticker.
