to dig a bed that would fit her lovers, for the queen of the Scheldt.
But, though they were exacting, at least these loves were fecund.
Around each basin, the whole length of the quays, cranes and hoists driven by water power and steam, and tended by gangs of Herculean dockers stretched far and wide. As alarming as the ballistic engines and siege machines invented long ago by Gianibelli, the Antwerpian Archimedes, to shatter to bits and sink the galleons of Farnese, their immoderate arms brandishing a perpetual threat toward heaven, they no longer tore ships from their element, but, after having plunged their hooks, like hands armed with forceps, into the depths of the hold, they hoisted out, without too much grinding of chains or teeth, the cargoes stowed away in these wombs perpetually in travail.
Communicating with the docks and the roadstead by means of powerful locks provided with gang-planks and revolving bridges, were lined the dry-docks, like convalescent homes next to maternity hospitals. There all sick and wounded ships were recruited. A swarm of operators, calkers and painters, took charge of the damaged boat, skinned it, repaired it, plated it, paved it, painted it freshly; and the reverberations of hammers, mallets and picks drowned the wailing of the cranes, and the whistle of sirens and the crash of cartage.
Then, beyond the hospital, the pound and the morgue. Waste fields where carcasses of ships, lying upon their sides, eaten up with sea-wrack, cracked, with the air of incurable or stranded whales, waited for the wrecker, or finished by rotting like carrion among the refuse and minor wrecks.
Then he pushed his exploration farther on. He
