steamer

It's the hottest month of the year here, but the heat is coming up, steam up through the pipes, comes up daily now, or nightly, and typically at 4.00 AM with not so much a fanfare as a drumroll. In fact it is hardly so rapid a beat. The pace is dirgelike, or else like the drumbeat for rowers of some enormous becalmed boat, slipping through the dark water on brute manpower, pulled in time with the deliberate striking of a bronze-headed drum.

Or, such are the thoughts that might occur to the half-waking mind when that mind is pulled like a flopping fish from sleep at 4.00 AM by the insistent, slow, and not least loud clank and tap of the rising steam. The radiator in the next room becomes that bronze-headed drum, or perhaps the boat itself, of iron, like in a Russian fairytale, and that boat is the conveyance of sleep on the shining surface of the night. But, perversely, despite steady rowing by the crewmen of that great ship of sleep, you are yourself uncomfortably awake, and you remain so, considering that contradiction until the metallic drumbeat softens into a foghorn, and you are in Stöðvarfjörður or Truro before you know you are dreaming.