Page 21 (1/2)

While a very few hu direct contact with the Wanderer and its denizens, and while a nu eyes of science, most of e and by the destruction it did The first installment of destruction was volcanic and diastrophic The tides, or tidal strains, set up in Earth&039;s solid crust delivered their effects more swiftly than those in the ocean layer

Within six hours after the Wanderer&039;s appearance, there had been reat earthquake belts circu the northern shore of the Mediterranean into the heart of Asia Land was riven; cities were shaken and shattered Volcanoes glowed, spouted, and gushed redly A few exploded Shocks originated as far apart as Alaska and the Antarctic, ed across the oceans, iant, watery fists on reaching the shallows Hundreds of thousands died

Nevertheless there wereand reaving was only a rumor or a newspaper headline, or perhaps a voice on the radio during those hours of grace before the Wanderer peered over the horizon and poisoned the radio sky

Richard Hillary had dozed throughat all, and was only now beginning slowly to wake as the bus first crossed the Thames a little beyond Maidenhead He told hi that had tired hireat walker - as Dai Davies&039; literary ranting

Noas about noon, and the bus was approaching the tideway of the Thames and the dark, san a melancholy but not unpleasant rumination about the curses of industrialism, overpopulation, and overconstruction

"You&039;ve beenit, mate," said a short man in a bowler hat, who had taken the seat beside hiladly su the last quarter of a day there had been a considerable nuhout the world - apparently a seisles on a drum and decreed: "Utterly unprecedented!" - and as a result earthquake waves were a possibility even along British shores: ss had been posted and a fe coastal areas were being evacuated Several scientists, presuiant tides" in prospect, but such exaggerations had been sternly repudiated by responsible authorities People with proofreader minds joyously pointed out that to confuse tsunami with tides was an ancient popular error

At least the earthquake hullabaloo had knocked the giant Aain, Russia wasprotestations about a mysterious assault, successfully beaten off, on her precious lunar base

Not for the first tie&039;s vaunted "communications industry" had chiefly provided people and nations with theto extinction themselves and each other

He did not inforht, but instead turned to theas the bus slowed for Brentford, surveying that toith his novelist&039;s eyes, and was rewarded almost at once by a human phenomenon describable as "a scurry of plunia of that trade and fiveplaces He sestive troubles

The bus stopped, not far from the market and the confluence of the canalized Brent with the Tha loudly to the other: "Yes, I just rang up Mother at Kew and she&039;s dreadfully upset She says the lawn is afloat"

It happened quite suddenly then: an up-pooling of broater fro of equally dirty water fros

The event struck Richard with peculiar horror because, at a level alht, he saw it as sick, overfed houses discharging, quite independently of the hus involved with them, the product of their sickness Architectural diarrhea He wasn&039;t thinking at all of how the first sign of a flood is often the backing up of the sewers

And then there was a scamper of people, and at their heels a curb-to-curb rush of cleaner water, perhaps six inches deep, down the street, washing away the dirty

It pretty well had to be co from the Thames The tidy Thaer installh the seas covering almost three-quarters of Earth&039;s surface This watery film may be cosmically trivial, but it has always been a sort of infinity, of distance and of depth and of power, to the dwellers of Earth And it has always had its gods: Dagon, Nun, Nodens, Ran, Rigi, Neptune, Poseidon And the music of the seas is the tides

The harp of the seas, which Diana thewith bands of salt water

Across the great reaches of the Pacific and Indian Oceans stretch the bass strings: from the Philippines to Chile, from Alaska to Colombia, Antarctica to California, Arabia to Australia, Basutoland to Tasmania Here the deeper notes are sounded, so a full day

The Atlantic provides the middle voice, cantabile Here the teular, and the half-day the measure: the fa bands link Newfoundland to Brazil, Greenland to Spain, South Africa to the Antarctic

Where the strings cross they may damp each other out, as at the tidal nodes near Norway and the Windward Islands and at Tahiti, where the sun alone controls the little tides - far-distant Apollo plucking feebler than Diana, forever bringing highs at noon and ht, lows at sunset and dawn

The treble of the ocean harp is provided by tidal echoes and re-echoes in bays, estuaries, straits, and seas half landlocked These shortest strings are often loudest and fiercest, as a violin will do tides of Fundy and the Severn Estuary, of Northern France and the Strait of Magellan, of the Arabian and Irish Seas

Touched by the soft fingers of the ently - a foot or two up and down, five feet, ten, rarely twenty, most rarely more

But now the harp of the seas had been torn froed by fingers eighty ti the first day after the Wanderer&039;s appearance the tides rose and fell five to fifteen ti the second day, ten to twenty-five, the water&039;s response swiftly building to the Wanderer&039;s wild harping Tides of six feet became sixty; tides of thirty, three hundred - and enerally followed the old patterns - a different harpist, but the same harp Tahiti was only one of the many areas on Earth - not all of them far inland - unruffled by the presence of the Wanderer, hardly aware of it except as a showy astronomic spectacle

The coasts contain the seas alls which the tides themselves help bite out In few places are the seas faced with long sweeps of flat land where the tide each day can takestrides landward and back: the Netherlands and Northern Germany, a few other beaches and salt marshes, Northwest Africa

But there are many flat coasts only a few feet or a few dozen feet above the ocean There the multiplied tides raised by the Wanderer reat heads of water behind the valleys ahead, some e, filled with sand and soil, footed by clanking stones and crashing rocks At other spots the invasion of the tide was silent as death

At points of sharp tides and sharp but not very high coastal walls - Fundy, the Bristol Channel, the estuaries of the Seine and the Thames and the Fuchun - spill-overs occurred: greatout over the land in all directions

Shallow continental shelves were swept by the drain of low tides, their sands cascaded into ocean abysses Deep-sunk reefs and islands appeared; others were covered as deeply Shallow seas, and gulfs like the Persian, were drained once or twice daily Straits were grooved deeper Seawater poured across low isthmi Counties and countries of fertile fields were salt-poisoned Herds and flocks ashed away Homes and toere scoured flat Great ports were drowned

Despite the fog of catastrophe and the suddenness of the astronoies of rescue performed: a thousand Dunkirks, a hundred thousand brave iuards and the Red Cross functioned meritoriously; and some of the preparations for atomic and other catastrophe paid off

Yetand were able to take flight and did Others, even in areas most affected, did not

Dai Davies strode across the h the dissipating light fog with the furious energy and concentration of a drunkard at the peak of his alcoholic powers His clothes and hands were smeared where he&039;d twice slipped and fallen, only to scramble up and pace on with hardly a check Frolanced back and corrected his course when he saw his footsteps veering And froedhis stride

The Souest loo mist ofsince there had died away the insincere cheers and uncaring admonitions - "Come back, you daft Welshman, you&039;ll drown!" - of the pub-

He chanted sporadically: "Five miles to Wales across the sands, fro it with such curses as "Effing loveless Somersets! - I&039;ll sha Yanks!" and such snatches of his half-composed Farewell to Mono as, "Frore Mona in yourwhite fingers inahead A helicopter ghosted by, going downriver, but the roaring remained Dai crossed a particularly sliht and had to be jerked plopping out He decided it reat sandy stretch of bottorew louder; the going got easier because the sands were sloping down again; a last mist-veil faded; and suddenly his as blocked by a rapid, turbid river es and eating greedily at the sandy banks to either side

He stopped in stupefaction It had simply never occurred to him that, no matter ho the tide went, the Severn was a river and would keep flowing And now he knew he couldn&039;t have come a quarter of the way across the Channel

Upstrea where - to be sure! - the Avon caer river