watered down by wind and distance, while Golden Dawn gathered momentum.
it was an incredible, even a stirring sight, and despite himself,
Nicholas felt the goose-bumps rise upon his fore-arms and the hair lift
on the back of his neck. He was a sailor, and he was watching the
birthing of the mightiest vessel ever built.
She was grotesque, monstrous, but she was part of him.
No matter that others had bastardized and perverted his grand design -
still the original design was his and he found himself gripping the
binoculars with hands that shook.
He watched the massive wooden-wedged arresters kick out from under that
great sliding mass of steel as they served to control her stern-first
rush down the ways. Steel cable whipped and snaked upon itself like the
Medusa's hair, and Golden Dawn's stern struck the water.
The brown muddy water of the estuary opened before her, cleaved by the
irresistible rush and weight, and the hull drove deep, opening
white-capped rollers that spread out across the channel and broke upon
the shores with a dull roar that carried clearly to where Nicholas
stood.
The crowd that lined the bridge was cheering wildly.
Beside him, a mother held her infant up to watch, both of them screaming
with glee.
While Golden Dawn's bows were still on the dockyard's ways her stern was
thrusting irresistibly a mile out into the river; forced down by the
raised bows it must now be almost touching the muddy bottom for the wave
was breaking around her stern quarters.
God, she was huge! Nicholas shook his head in wonder.
If only he had been able to build her the right way, what a ship she
would have been. What a magnificent concept!
Now her bows left the end of the slips, and the waters burst about her,
seething and leaping into swirling vortices.
Her stern started to rise, gathering speed as her own buoyancy caught
her, and she burst out like a great whale rising to blow. The waters
spilled from her, creaming and cascading through the steelwork of her
open decks, boiling madly in the cavernous openings that would hold the
pod tanks when she was fully loaded.
Now she came up short on the hundreds of retaining cables that prevented
her from driving clear across the river and throw - herself ashore on
the far bank.
She fought against this restraint, as though having felt the water she
was now eager to run. She rolled and dipped and swung with a ponderous
majesty that kept the crowds along the bridge cheering wildly. Then
slowly she settled and floated quietly, seeming to fill the Loire River
from bank to bank and to reach as high as the soaring spans of the
bridge itself.
The four attendant harbour tugs moved in quickly to assist the ship to
turn its prodigious length and to line up for the roads and the open
sea.
They butted and backed, working as a highly skilled team, and slowly
they coaxed Golden Dawn around. Her sideways motion left a mile-wide
