es on the shingle
banks and flows in waves on either side of her like two gray horses with
white manes that canter slowly along, a solemn escort, until the channel
between the islands is passed. Day and night, winter and summer, these
two gray horses are always waiting; no ship ever surprises them asleep;
no ship enters but they rise up and shake their manes and accompany her
with their flowing, cantering motion along the confines of their
territory. And when you have passed the gates that they guard you are in
Belfast Harbour, in still and muddy water that smells of the land and
not of the sea; for you seem already to be far from the things of the
sea.

As you have entered the narrow channel a new sound, also far different
from the liquid sounds of the sea, falls on your ear; at first a low
sonorous murmuring like the sound of bees in a giant hive, that rises to
a ringing continuous music--the multitudinous clamour of thousands of
blows of metal on metal. And turning to look whence the sound arises you
seem indeed to have left the last of the things of the sea behind you;
for on your left, on the flattest of the mud flats, arises a veritable
forest of iron; a leafless forest, of thousands upon thousands of bare
rusty trunks and branches that tower higher than any forest trees in our
land, and look like the ruins of some giant grove submerged by the sea
in the brown autumn of its life, stripped of its leaves and laid bare
again, the dead and rusty remnants of a forest. There is nothing with
any broad or continuous surface--only thousands and thousands of iron
branches with the gray sky and the smoke showing through them
everywhere, giant cobwebs hanging between earth and the sky, intricate,
meaningless networks of trunks and branches and sticks and twigs of
iron.

But as you glide nearer still you see that the forest is not lifeless,
nor its branches deserted. From the bottom to the topmost boughs it is
crowded with a life that at first seems like that of mites in the
interstices of some rotting fabric, and then like birds crowding the
branches of the leafless forest, and finally appears as a multitude of
pigmy men swarming and toiling amid the skeleton iron structures that
are as vast as cathedrals and seem as frail as gossamer. It is from them
that the clamour arises, the clamour that seemed so gentle and musical a
mile away, and that now, as you come closer, grows strident and
deafening. Of all the sounds produced