The Wanderer

On Richard’s polite though tepid inquiry, he gladly summarized. During the last quarter of a day there had been a considerable number of earthquakes throughout the world — apparently a seismologist had counted squiggles on a drum and decreed: “Utterly unprecedented!” — and as a result earthquake waves were a possibility even along British shores: small craft warnings had been posted and a few low coastal areas were being evacuated. Several scientists, presumably sensation-mongering, had issued statements about “giant 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 American saucer out of the news. Though, to balance that gain, Russia was making bomb-rattling protestations about a mysterious assault, successfully beaten off, on her precious lunar base.

Not for the first time, Richard reflected that this age’s vaunted “communications industry” had chiefly provided people and nations with the means of frightening to death and simultaneously boring to extinction themselves and each other.

He did not inform his seatmate of this insight, but instead turned to the window as the bus slowed for Brentford, surveying that town with his novelist’s eyes, and was rewarded almost at once by a human phenomenon describable as “a scurry of plumbers": he counted three small cars with the insignia of that trade and five men with toolbags or big wrenches, hurrying places. He smiled, thinking how overbuilding invariably brings its digestive troubles.

The bus stopped, not far from the market and the confluence of the canalized Brent with the Thames. Two women climbed in, the one saying loudly to the other: “Yes, I just rang up Mother at Kew and she’s dreadfully upset She says the lawn is afloat.”

It happened quite suddenly then: an up-pooling of brown water from the drains in the street, and a runneling of equally dirty water from the entries of several buildings.

The event struck Richard with peculiar horror because, at a level almost below conscious thought, he saw it as sick, overfed houses discharging, quite independently of the human beings involved with them, the product of their sickness. Architectural diarrhea. He wasn’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 coming from the Thames. The tidy Thames, Spenser’s “Sweete Themmes.”

The second and larger installment of destruction was delivered by the Wanderer through the seas covering almost three-quarters of Earth’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 the moon goddess strums with rapt solemnity, is strung with bands of salt water miles thick, hundreds of miles wide, thousands of miles long.

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, some vibrations lasting a full day.

The Atlantic provides the middle voice, cantabile. Here the tempo is quicker and more regular, and the half-day the measure: the familiar, semidaily tides of Western history. Major vibrating 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 midnight, 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 dominate a bass viol: the high-mounting 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 moon, the water bands vibrate gently — a foot or two up and down, five feet, ten, rarely twenty, most rarely more.