The Storm Read Online Free PDF

look into his slightly bloodshot eyes. He wasn’t grinning.
    “Lofty words.”
    “Am I boring you?”
    “Absolutely not. Actually, this is my first time here.” And like someone who in a chance moment recognizes that the heavens are the eternal, everlasting, primeval landscape of our minds, she said, “Yes, we say it’s beautiful, but just think of everything that lies behind it all, you know?”
    “True, true.”
    Unanimity. Which the chief engineer took advantage of to turn the conversation to the jet stream, the great band of wind racing through the topmost layer of the troposphere. Six to eight miles up it sweeps across continents and is capable of compressing the atmosphere into a single area of unbroken low pressure, or pumping it into an area of high pressure, just like a balloon.
    “Picture it like a gigantic bicycle pump.”
    She did, but meanwhile kept peering at the horizon: for some time now they had been sailing parallel to dikes on which occasionally a little building was to be seen, and even a church steeple poking up here and there. On one of these she spotted a wildly fluttering flag. That’s already the second or third today, she thought, until it dawned on her that it was Princess Beatrix’s birthday. How old was she? Fourteen? Fifteen?
    “And finally we get to the weather,” said the chief engineer. “Rain,wind, yeah. Weather is never-ending, isn’t it? Strictly speaking, weather and wind are the backdrop to our entire lives.”
    “Odd thought.”
    “Air, that does nothing but stream from an area of high pressure into an area of low pressure.”
    She smiled at him over her shoulder almost companionably, but he curbed this immediately. In a tone that was suddenly almost authoritarian he said, “Umm, as you will feel, the force of the wind is picking up by the minute!”
    Meantime the ship had clearly changed course, and was beginning to pitch and toss. She noticed that the shorelines in either direction were farther away again and that they were sailing straight into the wind. The voice of the chief engineer, almost impossible to understand now, was still delivering his fantastical nature lecture at her. When she didn’t react, he tapped her on the arm.
    “And do you want to know about this racket? Believe me, if the monstrous eye of this storm is gathering itself over the North Sea and sucking everything up with all its force—do you get it?—that’s what it’ll take—that’s when we can look forward to a really major show.”
    This seemed to end the conversation. Seemed to, for Lidy, who was actually thinking, God, fine, now how can I just get rid of this man, stood for several seconds staring back at him.
    “Yes?” asked the chief engineer.
    She shook her head and looked away.
    As far as the eye could see, the oncoming flood tide. Both of them looked at it, until the chief engineer turned to her again. Emphatically, as if imparting a conclusion, he said, “Vlissingen. Hook of Holland.”
    Yes?
    Could she imagine that after a weekend like this he was going to be really dying to know what the monitoring stations over there were going to produce as today’s measurements?
    Feeble laugh. Her back half turned to him, she didn’t say anything in reply. The chief engineer moved so that he was in front of her again. She clasped her hands, rubbed them, and blew on them. Now what?
    “I think I’m going to lie down.”
    If that was okay with her. He said he was going to stretch out on one of the benches in the passenger area, the wedding he was coming from in Hoeksche Waard had gone on till dawn. There was nothing he liked better, he explained, than to sleep in storms and bad weather. So he was going to give himself a little foretaste of tonight. Hadn’t she had enough of the cold and the wind? Okay, he shook her hand and then in the same gesture threw his arm wide.
    “Over there is England, that way at an angle is France, up there are the West Frisian Islands, and we’re in the