Though the catwalk gives and trembles with the lightest passing weight, its pilings go deep into mud trowelled by countless tides into bars and sumps of soft alluvial ooze. Below high-water mark these no longer seem like wood: a crust of barnacles, pyæmic streaks of rust bleeding from buried nailheads, the flower and slime of clinging weed, and the congealed fibres of forgotten rope have together wrought them into something half alive.

At low tide the boats sit well below the catwalk, forty yards of mud, popping and sucking in fluid respiration, between them and the river. Worms slide through its pores and tiny crabs dig hastily into its oily chyme as long-legged birds, the imprint of their feet like smudged runes, stalk toward them over endlessly draining rills.

Some of these boats, from too many years of domestication or neglect, will never sail again; but when the sun distils from their decks a warmth of old planks and loosened tar, and the same wind that darkens the river with the shiver of a passing cloud also rattles some bleached and desiccated halyard against a blistered mast, it's as though they can still recall.

But now the first, bubbling waters of the incoming tide slide along the bottoms of the boats. Small day-craft tip suddenly on their keels, tilting their slender masts. Bilge pumps spit a greasy stream and out-boards stutter tightly before settling into a muffled gargle. Eager wavelets vie with the sun for the catwalk's lower stage, surging and slapping under green-grained planks, then washing over them as one by one the larger boats rise with calm unhurried dignity to swing, now by the bow, now by the stern, as if testing the security of their own moorings.

It's a trip you've made often: down on the ebb to the mouth of the river, anchor overnight, come back on the afternoon tide. The big diesel under the sole shakes itself awake with an iron clatter, sending tremors through the hull, and the prop hauls you astern into the river's elemental keeping.

And because you have made the trip before, past the seasonal yachts moored stem to stern in tidy trots; past rusting lighters so long away from land and men they look like dripping sea-beasts; past powerful black tugs moored two and three abreast, strong and alert, nudging each other's iron tonnage; past deserted piers whose massive, tarred timbers, rising emptily above you, spread thick skirts of weed and wrack with the lift of every wave ^___since this is known to you, the way the land to either side becomes a living, moving thing, growing its hills, extending its promontories; the way the low islands hold their challenging gaze as you pass, and the channel buoys with their tough painted hides keep you in sight as they tussle with the strengthening waves ^___all this being familiar, including perhaps the sheer, towering sides of a cargo ship, wreathed with the glamour of the open sea, discharging into the river the waters of foreign lands ^___because these are part of you, they don't distract the mind's long-distance gaze.