It was a day that
was still half night. Gray waters stretched in every direction under a
dark gray sky, and out of the waves rose the upper parts of houses, in
many cases ruined, the tops of trees, windmills, in fact the upper third
of all the familiar Dutch scenery; and on it there drifted a dimly seen
flotilla of barges, small boats, many overturned, furniture, rafts,
timbering, and miscellaneous objects.
The drowned were under water that morning. Only here and there did a
dead cow or a stiff figure still clinging stoutly to a box or chair or
such-like buoy hint at the hidden massacre. It was not till the Thursday
that the dead came to the surface in any quantity. The view was bounded
on every side by a gray mist that closed overhead in a gray canopy. The
air cleared in the afternoon, and then, far away to the west under great
banks of steam and dust, the flaming red eruption of the atomic bombs
came visible across the waste of water.
They showed flat and sullen through the mist, like London sunsets. 'They
sat upon the sea,' says Barnet, 'like frayed-out waterlilies of flame.'
Barnet seems to have spent the morning in rescue work along the track
of the canal, in helping people who were adrift, in picking up derelict
boats, and in taking people out of imperilled houses.
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