Free On the Shores of the Mediterranean by Eric Newby

hear more than we could see of it: the melancholy cryingof gulls, the tolling of a bell mounted on a buoy moored out in one of the channels, the noise of boat engines and, occasionally, angry cries as helmsmen, set on collision courses, recorded near misses. Altogether, with the whole of the Mediterranean to choose from, it was a hell of a place to end up in on such a day. We might just as well have been on the Mersey, for all the genius loci I was able to sop up, and this made me think of home, a hot bath and a couple of slugs of Glenmorangie.
    ‘You’re in trouble, author,’ said Wanda, my companion in life’s race, near the mark as always, sensing that I felt like emigrating back to Britain, ‘if you can’t see what you’re looking at.’
    As she said this, as if to show that she wasn’t always right, the fog lifted, not everywhere, not over Venice itself which remained cocooned in it, but here and there, and for a few moments that didn’t even add up to minutes we found ourselves looking down long corridors of vapour illuminated by an eerie yellow light that must have been the last of the setting sun, down which one had distant prospects of mud banks uncovered by the tide, with labyrinths of channels running through them, and one or two of the almost innumerable islands of the Lagoon which supported until quite recently – and some still support – monasteries, nunneries, forts, miniature versions of Venice, a cemetery, and the lonely enclosure to which, once every ten years when it begins to fill up, bones are taken; fishing settlements, lodges used by the wildfowlers who in winter wait in barrels sunk in the Lagoon for the dawn and dusk flights, quarantine stations, lighthouses, hospitals, lunatic asylums, prisons, barracks, magazines that, when they were full of gunpowder, had a tendency to go up in the air, taking their custodians with them, deserted factories, old people’s homes, private houses, market gardens, vineyards, and some that were just open expanses that a farmer might visit once or twice a year to cut the hay. The channels among them were marked by longlines of bricole , wooden piles either driven into the bottom with their heads pressed together, as if they were lovers meeting in a lagoon, or else in clusters of three or four, also with their heads pressed together as if they were conspirators discussing some dark secret. Some of the more important channels had lights on the bricole . Some that were only navigable by the smallest sorts of craft, such as gondolas and boats called sandali , were indicated by lines of saplings.
    There was another, equally momentary vista of part of one of the industrial zones that had been created by filling in vast areas of the northern part of the Lagoon and its mud flats, a huge, nightmare, end-of-the-world place without houses or permanent inhabitants, made up of oil refineries, chemical, fertilizer, plastic, steel, light alloy, coke, gas and innumerable other plants all belching dense smoke and residual gases into the sky and effluents into the Lagoon, so various and awful that collectively they made up a brew that even to a layman sounded as if it had been devised by a crew of mad scientists intent on destroying the human race, which in effect is what they are doing. Then the fog closed in again, more impenetrable than ever now that the sun was almost gone.
    According to the tide table I had bought that morning in Chioggia it was now just after low water at Porto di Lido, what had been the principal entrance to the Lagoon and to Venice when it was commonplace to see 60,000-ton tankers wandering about in St Mark’s Basin. This was until they dredged the deep-water channel from Porto Malamocco to Marghera, using the material brought up from the bottom as infilling for the Third Industrial Zone. About now the flood would be beginning to run through Porto di Lido, Porto di Malamocco, and also through Porto di Chioggia, the three entrances that the Magistrates