into a kind of anesthetic, through which the voice of the chief engineer echoed with all the logic of a dream….
“My God,” she said.
“I take it that you’re ready for me to give you a few facts and figures. Or …?”
She nodded.
“Well …” The chief engineer glanced upward for a moment to focus his concentration. “This century has already seen quite a number of storm tides, and most of them were minor; we get a minor storm tide here almost every year, and things are underwater all over the place, you know. Medium storm tides, which is what we call them at the Hydraulic Authorities, pack a bigger wallop, they occur, let’s say, between once a decade and once every hundred years. Remember the winter of 1906, when a hurricane drove the North Sea near Vlissingen up almost fourteen feet above the Normal Amsterdam Water Level, causing enormous damage. I’m sorry? No, nobody drowned. Or maybe just one or two.”
The chief engineer massaged his hands. She saw that his face was changing, saw that minor and moderate storm floods were visibly giving way to something more drastic, and here it came: “The third category that we distinguish is the high storm flood. A frequent phenomenon? No. Occurs merely once every hundred to a thousand years. Good, I see you’re nodding. The Hydraulic Authorities have never actually measured one as such, let alone broken it down into accurate statistics.”
He paused for a moment. Then, with a kind of enthusiasm that mystified her, he explained that science did recognize a supreme category of storm tide, a four-star ranking, signifying a catastrophe that, however unlikely, could not be written off as impossible just because it might occur in this part of the world every ten thousand years.
He leaned forward with his head and mouthed something, but she didn’t understand.
“Sorry?” she asked, and the answer came in a roar.
“The extreme storm flood! Oh! Can you just imagine it? Have you never heard anything about the hellish catastrophes in the old days? The Saint Elisabeth’s flood in the fifteenth century, that swallowed up our entire province of South Holland? A century later: Saint Felix, even worse, a storm that felt called upon to restore all the mussels and crabs to the twenty villages around Reimerswaal in perpetuity. And then, darn it, forty years later, in the blink of an eye, statistically speaking, enter the All Saints Flood, and people are thinking all over again that it’s the end of the world!”
The chief engineer laughed for a moment. Then: “Nature’s fits of rage, every one of them responsible for enormous numbers of deaths!” Did she also grasp that this entire spectacle often ran its course with such extreme results not merely by force of nature but because of the shiftless maintenance of the dikes? Only a mountain contained its own mass unaided. Please would she believe him if he assured her—it was clear that he wanted to utter some unvarnished truth, the kind that makes your ears prick up—assured her as an insider, that the crests of the dikes even today failed to meet the norm?
He was looking at her with the peremptoriness of a man who knows the figures pretty damn well.
“Umm … you’re a nice young lady. Am I alarming you?”
Not at all, though now her eyes were fixed on something else. A little ship, tiny in fact. It was about sixty yards away, chugging along in the opposite direction. She squeezed her eyes shut. Sometimes it disappeared up to the wheelhouse in the waves, and then she would be able to see the black tarpaulin and read the name,
Compassion
, before it plunged back into the depths. Rays of light piercing down through the cloud formations gave the scene a theatrical air.
“I … think it’s really beautiful.”
“Indeed, it’s impressive,” the chief engineer admitted. Then, after a pause: “Cosmic and earthly powers from unimaginably distant regions are converging right in front of us.”
She gave a searching
“My God,” she said.
“I take it that you’re ready for me to give you a few facts and figures. Or …?”
She nodded.
“Well …” The chief engineer glanced upward for a moment to focus his concentration. “This century has already seen quite a number of storm tides, and most of them were minor; we get a minor storm tide here almost every year, and things are underwater all over the place, you know. Medium storm tides, which is what we call them at the Hydraulic Authorities, pack a bigger wallop, they occur, let’s say, between once a decade and once every hundred years. Remember the winter of 1906, when a hurricane drove the North Sea near Vlissingen up almost fourteen feet above the Normal Amsterdam Water Level, causing enormous damage. I’m sorry? No, nobody drowned. Or maybe just one or two.”
The chief engineer massaged his hands. She saw that his face was changing, saw that minor and moderate storm floods were visibly giving way to something more drastic, and here it came: “The third category that we distinguish is the high storm flood. A frequent phenomenon? No. Occurs merely once every hundred to a thousand years. Good, I see you’re nodding. The Hydraulic Authorities have never actually measured one as such, let alone broken it down into accurate statistics.”
He paused for a moment. Then, with a kind of enthusiasm that mystified her, he explained that science did recognize a supreme category of storm tide, a four-star ranking, signifying a catastrophe that, however unlikely, could not be written off as impossible just because it might occur in this part of the world every ten thousand years.
He leaned forward with his head and mouthed something, but she didn’t understand.
“Sorry?” she asked, and the answer came in a roar.
“The extreme storm flood! Oh! Can you just imagine it? Have you never heard anything about the hellish catastrophes in the old days? The Saint Elisabeth’s flood in the fifteenth century, that swallowed up our entire province of South Holland? A century later: Saint Felix, even worse, a storm that felt called upon to restore all the mussels and crabs to the twenty villages around Reimerswaal in perpetuity. And then, darn it, forty years later, in the blink of an eye, statistically speaking, enter the All Saints Flood, and people are thinking all over again that it’s the end of the world!”
The chief engineer laughed for a moment. Then: “Nature’s fits of rage, every one of them responsible for enormous numbers of deaths!” Did she also grasp that this entire spectacle often ran its course with such extreme results not merely by force of nature but because of the shiftless maintenance of the dikes? Only a mountain contained its own mass unaided. Please would she believe him if he assured her—it was clear that he wanted to utter some unvarnished truth, the kind that makes your ears prick up—assured her as an insider, that the crests of the dikes even today failed to meet the norm?
He was looking at her with the peremptoriness of a man who knows the figures pretty damn well.
“Umm … you’re a nice young lady. Am I alarming you?”
Not at all, though now her eyes were fixed on something else. A little ship, tiny in fact. It was about sixty yards away, chugging along in the opposite direction. She squeezed her eyes shut. Sometimes it disappeared up to the wheelhouse in the waves, and then she would be able to see the black tarpaulin and read the name,
Compassion
, before it plunged back into the depths. Rays of light piercing down through the cloud formations gave the scene a theatrical air.
“I … think it’s really beautiful.”
“Indeed, it’s impressive,” the chief engineer admitted. Then, after a pause: “Cosmic and earthly powers from unimaginably distant regions are converging right in front of us.”
She gave a searching
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