The Wanderer

But now the harp of the seas had been torn from Diana’s and Apollo’s hands and was being twanged by fingers eighty times stronger. During the first day after the Wanderer’s appearance the tides rose and fell five to fifteen times higher and lower than normally and, during the second day, ten to twenty-five, the water’s response swiftly building to the Wanderer’s wild harping. Tides of six feet became sixty; tides of thirty, three hundred — and more.

The giant tides generally 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 with walls 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 take miles-long strides 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 moved ten, twenty, fifty, and more miles inland. With great heads of water behind them and with narrowing valleys ahead, some moved swiftly and destructively, fronted and topped by wreckage, 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: great mushrooms of water welling out 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 were washed away. Homes and towns were scoured flat. Great ports were drowned.

Despite the fog of catastrophe and the suddenness of the astronomic strike, there were prodigies of rescue performed: a thousand Dunkirks, a hundred thousand brave improvisations. Disaster-focused organizations such as coast guards and the Red Cross functioned meritoriously; and some of the preparations for atomic and other catastrophe paid off.

Yet millions died.

Some saw disaster coming and were able to take flight and did. Others, even in areas most affected, did not.

Dai Davies strode across the mucky, littered bottom-sands of the Severn Estuary through 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’d twice slipped and fallen, only to scramble up and pace on with hardly a check. From time to time he glanced back and corrected his course when he saw his footsteps veering. And from time to time he swigged measuredly from a flat bottle without breaking his stride.

The Somerset shore had faded long since, except for the vaguest loom through the remaining mist of maritime industrial structures upriver toward Avonmouth. Long since there had died away the insincere cheers and uncaring admonitions — “Come back, you daft Welshman, you’ll drown!” — of the pub-mates he’d met this morning.

He chanted sporadically: “Five miles to Wales across the sands, from noon to two while the ebb tide stands,” occasionally varying it with such curses as “Effing loveless Somersets! — I’ll shame ’em!” and “Damned moon-grabbing Yanks!” and such snatches of his half-composed Farewell to Mono as, “Frore Mona in your meteor-skiff…Girlglowing, old as Fomalhaut…Trailing white fingers in my pools…Drawing my waters to and fro…”

There was a faint roaring ahead. A helicopter ghosted by, going downriver, but the roaring remained. Dai crossed a particularly slimy dip in which his shoes sank out of sight and had to be jerked plopping out. He decided it must be Severn channel and that he was now mounting onto the great sandy stretch of bottom known as the Welsh Grounds.

But the roaring grew louder; the going got easier because the sands were sloping down again; a last mist-veil faded; and suddenly his way was blocked by a rapid, turbid river more than a hundred yards wide, humping into foam-crested ridges and eating greedily at the sandy banks to either side.

He stopped in stupefaction. It had simply never occurred to him that, no matter how low the tide went, the Severn was a river and would keep flowing. And now he knew he couldn’t have come a quarter of the way across the Channel.

Upstream he could see an angry white humping and jetting where — to be sure! — the Avon came crashing into the bigger river.