Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/149

Rh in which they were to tie up for the night. Lazy barges slipped down stream with the tide so slowly that they seemed almost immobile and unconscious of the titillating caress of the flaming water, charged with electricity like the fur of a cat.

White sails became rose. The decks, the loins and the flanks of the boats were almost lifeless at this hour. And every little while the graceful silhouette of a sailor, hauling in a cable or repairing a mast, would stand in bold relief, tall and black, against the sail of the ship's boat, taking on an air of indescribably fateful authority and superterrestrial worth.

To the right, on the border of the residence quarter, there plunged deeply inland, as if following upon a victory of the river over the land, great square sheets of water that were the basins, and yet more basins, from which shot up in compact tufts thousands of entangled crossyards and masts. And in this forest of masts, pierheads, gangways, locks and drydocks, rose faintly and by fits and starts against the horizon.

In certain parts of the basins the crowding was so great that, viewed from a distance, the masting and rigging of the closely packed boats seemed to be tangled up, to cross, and conjured up a web so tightly woven that it clouded the opaline sky or pricked off an early star, setting one to dream of the cloths woven by fabled genii, where the multicolored signal lights and silvery constellations began to appear like glowworms and fireflies.

Ready to seek its rest, the swarm of workers hurried, redoubled its activity, in a desire to finish its daily task. To recrudescences of tumult there succeeded sudden lulls. The calkers' pickaxes ceased hammering at rotted hulls, the chains of the hand winches suspended