View allAll Photos Tagged Thrumming
Made for SWFactions on Eurobricks, for the Halloween challenge.
Original post with more pictures: www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?/forums/topic/181006-i...
Everything had gone wrong when Rampart Station jumped to hyperspace.
Biliff hadn’t heard anything since then. He was used to not seeing anybody while he spent his time in the tunnels, but he wasn’t used to radio silence. Radio silence was wrong.
He had peeked out into the main corridors, awash in hyperspace blue. He heard laughing, and crying, and a voice from the shadows. Someone was chasing someone. Everyone else was ignoring them. A Rodian was smashing his own head against a bulwark.
Grimacing, Biliff closed and sealed the maintenance hatch. Something was wrong. This hadn’t been on the schedule. And such strange behavior from the other crew…Not that he got out much, but he knew this wasn’t just fun, celebration antics. Could it be mutiny? A saboteur? His heart hammering, he returned to the relative safety down below.
It was dark. Lighting had gone out. Life support, too. He could feel the air thinning. It would be sometime before they were out of oxygen, but he had to move quickly.
People needed him to do his job.
Dutifully, he crept through tunnels a larger being would have trouble navigating on his way to life support. Every few minutes he checked his comlink, to nothing but the sound of static every time.
“There, there, it will be alright,” said a voice.
The Ugnaught whipped around, brandishing a spanner at the darkness. “Who said that!” he cried.
No one replied.
It was gone. No one was there. The voice had been calm, smooth…and imagined, he was sure. “Craziness…” he murmured, shaking his head. He told himself it was just pressure, or steam, or the vents shifting. The station needed him to push on.
No one was in life support. The quiet set his nerves on edge. Moisture dripped from overhead, a spot of movement that had him turning to look behind him every few seconds. As quickly as he could, Biliff set all the gauges to receive power. Oxygen tanks came thrumming to life. No one would asphyxiate, that’s for sure.
He turned his mind to the hyperdrive. There would be no unscheduled jumps on his shift. That was for certain. If nothing else, he took pride in a well-organized, well-run station, and knew his vital role in its operation. Just because things were crazy, his role was no less important.
“Your life will end soon. These tunnels are your grave.” said a voice.
“W-What! I-Is that so!” cried the Ugnaught, raising his spanner once again. Once again, there was nothing for him to oppose. He shook off the thoughts that had snaked into his mind, thoughts of death and darkness, of watchers unseen. His life was a simple one. There were tasks to accomplish.
Getting to the hyperdrive took no time at all, but it would not disengage no matter what he tried, and he knew all the ways. This was not right. His methods were supposed to work. They had never not worked before.
Fear crept into his mind again, prompted by the break in normalcy. He had always trusted that no matter what went wrong, he at least knew engines, and sub-systems, and how they would behave and how to fix them when they didn’t. Now, for the first time, he was stripped of that confidence. He did not know what to do. Something did not want him to do what he was doing, and it wasn’t the hyperdrive.
“Father?” he heard someone say.
Father? His children were back in the colonies, weeks away. They were not on this station. He had insisted they not come; the Red Twins were dangerous. And yet, he heard them. Marqet’s voice, it had to be.
“…Son…?” he whispered over the hum of the hyperdrive.
“Father, space is trying to get inside, father.”
A shadow moved on the wall. The Ugnaught spun to look. Something moved just beyond his vision in the darkness, a shade. Taller than a man. It spoke just like his son.
It came closer. Knives in the darkness, malice in its creeping movements. Not human, not alien. Yet he knew, with dreamlike certainty, that it was his son. Of course it was his son. But he also knew it wanted to kill him. How could both these things be? Its jaws came closer.
“My son…I have a job to do…” he croaked. The room blinked around him, its eyes following. “Son, please!”
“Father!” cried the child-like voice, an innocent plea. The jaws stooped, dripping upon him.
Desperately, the Ugnaught turned. Raising his spanner, he brought it smashing down on the power cable attached to the hyperdrive. He heard it stress. He hit it again.
Pain flushed through him. He felt himself stumble, his leathery face hit the metal grating of the floor. He reached down towards the pain, and his hand came back wet. Something was gone. A leg. His son, why would his son do this?
“Father, there is no mercy, you know. No salvation for you! No friend in the darkness, no escape besides death. And it will not be a pleasant death,” said his child, crooning over him.
Biliff blinked back tears, grasping in the dark for his spanner. He touched something soft. His leg. “Son!” he cried in confusion. Then he felt his hand take hold of the surface of the spanner.
People needed him to do his job.
It was the dogma of his life. It would be the dogma of his end.
Reaching up with what strength remained, he bashed the power cable once more. The effort sent the spanner flying from his hand, too far to reach. It didn’t matter. With an enormous flash of power, the cable came untethered. The hyperdrive groaned, and sparked, and saw his son; enormous, dark, angry, looming over him. He felt the station forcibly exit hyperspace, come crashing to a halt. He heard the familiar metal creak and die and rip itself apart as it went from faster-than-light to still.
“You…are not my son!” said Biliff hoarsely. “And I have beaten you! I-I have done my job!”
“Now take your reward,” said the darkness, and the jaws creased into a smile.
Driving on a small mountain road, we passed a turn-off for a construction site where they were boring a hole for the eastern highway expansion. Past the excavators and pulverized rock, the road reverted to its narrow, tree-lined native state. Going around a bend, a white minivan, driving in the center, nearly collided with us head-on. Further on, after a few abandoned farm plots strewn with rusted garbage and collapsed fencing, fallen rocks started encroaching on the right, mountain side of the car. On the left there was only a sheer drop to the river below.
Sticks and twigs littered the dirty road. One got caught up under the car, but it didn't make the scraping sound you would expect. It sounded like the car radio (which was off) tuned to a dead channel. Just thick gray static hissing.
I stopped the car in the middle of the road, knowing that doing so was probably a bad idea. But I had to see if I could get the stick out from under the car. It was starting to sound a little too unnatural for our taste. I couldn't get it out. While I was kneeled down on the dirty hardtop, looking under the car--the stick was stuck dead-center, and there was no way I could reach it--I almost expected a truck to come plowing around the last bend behind us. None did, of course, or I may not be writing this to you now.
We continued through bends and dips in the cracked road, I doing my best to slalom the drainage ditch on the mountain side and the drop on the other, past faded number signs (we think for defunct logging roads) which counted down, starting somewhere around the number seventeen. As I rounded a bend to the right, view partially blocked by the frame of the windshield, the left half of the road, on the river side, dropped down where a chunk of pavement was missing off the top, a full hand's breadth lower than the unaffected right side of the road.
That took care of the stick that had been caught under the car. The jolt we felt as the left half of the car dropped into the depression made everyone consider whether continuing was really a good idea. This had come somewhere between numbered signs fourteen and twelve, of course. I wouldn't have been surprised if, had I looked down over the edge there, the number thirteen had been looking back up from the river below.
But continue we did, a sense of unease growing as each numbered sign swept by. The road emptied out on a mud and gravel parking lot for a campground we had never heard of. The way ahead looked sketchy, so I got out and walked a piece to see if it was passable. It wasn't. So we U-turned and parked in a patch that the car looked less likely to get bogged down in.
As we walked away from our makeshift parking space, down the road the car wouldn't have made it back from, we entered the shade of old and slanted evergreens (the glossy holly kind, not pines). The temperature felt like it dropped five degrees in a matter of steps.
There was a chain across the bridged entrance to the campground with a sign stating it was closed in the off season through next spring. Against our better judgment, we stepped over the chain and crossed the bridge.
Other than the wind, which had been blowing said sticks and twigs everywhere all day, there was only the cold sound of the river rushing by the campground. A second chain was stretched across the walkway into the campground proper, where we could see a few log cabins, so we stayed on the service road that ran around the left side of the campground. We did not see any cars, people, or signs of life. Just the wind and river and tree parts scattered like amputated limbs.
Usually when you're in the mountains around here, which are thickly forested in their natural state, you can see berries and wildflowers, young growth and gnarled old trees. But the forest surrounding this campground was wet, and dark. Trees--not ancient and proud, but sickly looking--leaned at strange angles. Where there should have been a nice little rain runoff between some exposed rocks, trunks and branches had fallen, choking it and smothering. The water didn't flow. It leaked, silently seeping out from under. Someone made a joke about zombie crows coming to peck out our eyes.
Halfway around the outside of the campground, we realized we wouldn't be able to cross the river to walk back to the car on the far side. Backtracking around the outside of the campground did not appeal to anyone, so we decided to walk through the campground's center. As we passed the building labeled Shower House, in the row of water pumps/heaters attached to the side of the building, one was running. It's single red light a thrumming bloody cyclops. As far as we knew, we were the only people for miles of wind-swept forest. We didn't stick around to find out who might be using one of the shower rooms, or why. Someone joked, trying to lighten the mood, that maybe it was an axe murderer cleaning up. I think we all walked a little faster after that.
Through most of the grounds, the sound from three empty flagpoles panged arrhythmically, their cords blowing in the wind. I could never have slept there on a windy night. Just walking by, the noise made you cringe.
We crossed the bridge with chain telling us not to enter. Looking toward the car from the shade, we were surprised to see rain falling on our car, which was simultaneously drenched in sunlight. The sunlight should have been a relief after our rushed pass through the campground. But seeing our car both in the sun and the rain was a bookend a little too out of place. Not wanting to stay longer than necessary, we ducked our heads and made for the car. By the time we arrived, the rain had all but blown by, and we were left standing in the sun, slightly damp but glad to be out of the campground.
That was when we noticed an old wooden plaque next to our car that we had missed earlier. It was a memorial marking where the foundation of an elementary school had stood nearly one hundred years before. And, my hand to God, the exact moment we finished remarking that there used to be a primary school here, this far out in the mountains, that long ago, a noise came from behind us. We didn't stick around long enough to figure out what it might have been. But the only way I can think to describe it is that it sounded an awful lot like a single terrible note, played on an old child's recorder.
In youth I dreamed, as other youths have dreamt,
Of love, and thrummed an amateur guitar
To verses of my own, – a stout attempt
To hold communion with the Evening Star
I wrote a sonnet, rhymed it, made it scan.
Ah me! how trippingly those last lines ran. –
O Hesperus! O happy star! to bend
O'er Helen's bosom in the trancéd west,
To match the hours heave by upon her breast,
And at her parted lip for dreams attend –
If dawn defraud thee, how shall I be deemed,
Who house within that bosom, and am dreamed?
For weeks I thought these lines remarkable;
For weeks I put on airs and called myself
A bard: till on a day, as it befell,
I took a small green Moxon from the shelf
At random, opened at a casual place,
And found my young illusions face to face
With this: – 'Still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair Love's ripening breast
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest;
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever,--or else swoon to death.'
O gulf not to be crossed by taking thought!
O heights by toil not to be overcome!
Great Keats, unto your altar straight I brought
My speech, and from the shrine departed dumb.
– And yet sometimes I think you played it hard
Upon a rather hopeful minor bard.
Title:
Near the Traffic Light.
(The plastic bag on the street has been removed in today’s photo.)
(LUMIX G3 shot)
Manhattan. New York. USA. 2017. … 3 / 7
Images.
ELLEGARDEN … The End Of The World
youtu.be/3hAKmshltDY?si=x3N9A-311MSsTeMw
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My New Novel
B♭ (B Flat)
Part Seven.
A partial release of my novel currently in progress.
(Of course, this is not the final draft.)😃
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Scene: Madison Square Garden – Jack, Ben, Crime Scene Investigation
On the stage inside the Garden, temporary lighting rigs hung above, and white-and-blue barricade tape had been strung across in four overlapping lines.
The audience seating had been completely cordoned off by the police, and the only sound was the distant thrum of a news helicopter circling overhead.
A team from the NYPD’s Major Case Squad surrounded the stage, working in steady silence.
At the center stood a man from the forensic unit, wearing a jacket with “FORENSIC UNIT” printed boldly across the back.
“Two shell casings confirmed. Behind the lighting on the far right of the stage...”
One gloved forensic technician carefully placed yellow numbered markers beside each casing. Another, from the photo unit, captured them from multiple angles.
“Two bullet impacts, beneath the main monitor. They pierced through the back panel. Slugs have already been retrieved.”
Another investigator was measuring angles with a tape and reconstructing the line of fire using a laser. The trajectory of the bullets would help trace back to the firing point.
Faint traces of blood remained on the stage floor—drying, crusting.
A forensic officer, wordless, dabbed a cotton swab into the stain and sealed it in a specimen pouch.
“The CCTV backup has already been handed over by Garden security. The footage is being transferred onto the central laptop.”
The officers moved with a quiet efficiency.
Everyone kept their words to a minimum, focused solely on the scene before them.
It was a dead space—a place where the echoes of screams still lingered in the walls.
Here, cold precision and raw confusion stood shoulder to shoulder, caught in the wake of violence.
Ben had mostly completed his initial forensic scan.
The two shots aimed at Justin had been fired from the overhead center-hung screen, triggered remotely via an online connection.
The voice of Jack, which had echoed through the Garden’s PA system, had been edited using AI.
The audio file had been remotely accessed, overwritten onto the announcement server via the venue’s sound control system, and then played back. That too had been done over the internet.
Jack, shielding his eyes from the ceiling lights, turned to Ben.
“Still, why the hell did he use his real name? Professor Zakaria Haddad, Department of Engineering, Islamic University.”
Ben replied, half in jest.
“Maybe we should ask ChatGPT. You know, just enough to stay within its leak-safe parameters.”
Jack gave him a silent go-ahead, pointing at the MacBook Air Ben had placed on the stage floor.
Ben opened the site and typed in his question:
“The news is saying that Justin, the Republican presidential candidate, was shot. But why would the shooter use his real name?”
The AI didn’t take long to reply.
“Because it was revenge. Most likely, the act was tied to a previous incident in which many lives were lost. He killed himself to declare his unwavering intent.”
Ben typed again.
“In the leaked video, he clearly places the muzzle to his temple and dies. The screen cuts to black right after. Why are you certain he's dead?”
He pasted in the video’s link.
This time, the pause was slightly longer—around five seconds.
“Judging from the blood drops on the desk under two HMI lights, yes. The blood is real. Given the context, death was likely instantaneous.”
Ben frowned, a trace of doubt crossing his mind. He typed again.
“HMI lights? Isn’t that just sunlight coming through the window?”
“It’s not natural light. It’s manufactured—electrical. Likely HMI lights used in studio setups, mimicking daylight color temperature, around 5600K. They are designed to replicate sunlight streaming through a window.”
Jack turned to Ben again.
“Marcus said Zakaria was in Brooklyn. Pull up the map.”
Then he added, almost as an afterthought:
“Justin and Owen both survived. And despite all this elaborate setup, neither was hit in the chest. Ben, ask it—was that intentional?”
Ben echoed Jack’s words into the keyboard. The response came immediately.
“Considering the trajectory from the ceiling and the configuration of the firing devices, the shooter deliberately missed.”
“Why?”
“Because if the target had died instantly, he would not have instilled fear. This was revenge.”
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My new novel:
B♭ (B-flat)
There’s still more to come. 😃
(This is not the final draft.)
Set in New York City.
6
www.flickr.com/photos/stealaway/54696914108/in/dateposted...
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www.flickr.com/photos/stealaway/54686544606/in/dateposted...
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www.flickr.com/photos/stealaway/54653035442/in/dateposted...
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www.flickr.com/photos/stealaway/54639396885/in/dateposted...
2
www.flickr.com/photos/stealaway/54628511025/in/dateposted...
1
www.flickr.com/photos/stealaway/54599616429/in/dateposted...
Soundtrack.
music.apple.com/jp/playlist/b-my-novel-soundtrack/pl.u-47...
Note: I gave a brief explanation of this novel in the following video:
youtu.be/3w65lqUF-YI?si=yG7qy6TPeCL9xRJV
iTunes Playlist Link::
music.apple.com/jp/playlist/b/pl.u-47DJGhopxMD
Notes
1. "Bombay Blood Type (hh type)"
•Characteristics: A rare blood type that lacks the usual ABO antigens — cannot be classified as A, B, or O.
•Discovery: First identified in 1952 in Mumbai, India (formerly Bombay).
•Prevalence: Roughly 1 in 10,000 people in India; globally, about 1 in 2.5 million.
•Transfusion Compatibility: Only compatible with blood from other Bombay type donors.
2. 2024 Harvard University Valedictorian Speech – The Power of Not Knowing
youtu.be/SOUH8iVqSOI?si=Ju-Y728irtcWR71K
3. Shots Fired at Trump Rally
youtu.be/1ejfAkzjEhk?si=ASqJwEmkY-2rW_hT
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Title.
信号機の付近。
( LUMIX G3 shot )
マンハッタン。ニューヨーク。アメリカ。2017. … 3 / 7
Images.
ELLEGARDEN … The End Of The World
youtu.be/3hAKmshltDY?si=x3N9A-311MSsTeMw
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
僕の新しい小説。
B♭ （ビーフラット）
第七弾。現在執筆中の小説を部分的に公開しています。😃
(もちろん最終稿ではありません。)
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場面 マジソンスクエアガーデン ジャック、ベン、現場検証
ガーデンのステージ上には、仮設の照明が吊られ、白と青のバリケードテープが四重に張られていた。
警察によって観客席は完全封鎖され、報道ヘリの音だけが遠くに響いている。
NYPDの犯罪捜査課（Major Case Squad）のチームがステージを囲み、黙々と作業を進めていた。その中心に立つのは、背中に「FORENSIC UNIT」と書かれたジャケットを着た鑑識の男だ。
「薬莢、２つ確認。ステージ右端の照明裏……」
手袋をはめた鑑識係が、番号の付いた黄色いマーカーを1つずつ並べていく。写真係がそれを角度を変えて何枚も撮る。
「着弾痕、メインモニター下に2発。バックパネルを貫通してる。弾は回収済み」
別の隊員がメジャーで角度を測定し、レーザーで射線の再現を行っていた。銃弾の軌道は、発砲位置を逆算する鍵になる。ステージ床には微かに血痕が残っており、それが乾いて固まりつつあった。鑑識の一人が無言で綿棒を取り出し、血痕を拭き取っては密封パックに入れていく。
「CCTVのバックアップ、ガーデンのセキュリティから提供済み。映像は中央のノートPCに取り込み中」
警官たちは淡々としていた。誰もが目の前の状況に集中しながら、言葉数を減らしていた。
ここは、叫び声の残響がまだ壁に漂う“死んだ空間”──冷静と混乱が隣り合わせに立ち尽くす、犯罪の余韻が散らばっていた。
ベンが現場を概ね鑑識した結果、ジャスティンを狙った二発は、頭上のセンター・ハング・スクリーンからで、ネット経由からの遠隔操作だった。
ガーデン館内にアナウンスされたジャックの音声は、AIで編集され、音響コントロールシステムにリモートで侵入し、アナウンス用サーバーへ音声ファイルを上書きし、再生されたものだ。もちろんこれもネットからの操作だ。
ジャックは、天井の光を手で遮りながら、ベンへいった。
「それにしても、どうしてわざわざ本名を名乗った？ イスラム大学工学部教授ザカリア・ハッダード」
ベンは冗談混じりに応えた。
「とりあえず、チャットGPTに尋ねるか？ 漏洩しないレベルで」
ジャックは、ステージの床に置いたマックブックエアを操作するベンを指差し、無言でゴーサインを出した。
ベンは、サイトを開いて質問した。
「テレビで共和党大統領候補のジャスティンが撃たれたニュースやってるけど、なんで犯人は本名を名乗ったと思う？」
AIはしばらく考え込むかと思ったが即答された。
「復讐だからです。おそらく、なんらかの事件の復讐が絡んでいるのでしょう。しかも大勢が亡くなられた事件です。だから彼は自分の固い意思を表明するために自殺したのです」
ベンはつづけた。
「流れた動画で、確かにこめかみに銃口を当て、死亡した。その後、画面は真っ黒になって終わったよ。どうして彼が亡くなったと確信する？」
ベンはそう打ち込んだ後、動画のリンク先を貼り付けた。
今度は、多少の時間を要したが、それでも５秒程度だ。
「2台のHMIライトに照らされ、机にこぼれた数滴の血液の表面から判断しました。この血液は本物です。動画の状況からおそらく彼は即死でしょう」
ベンは、回答に疑問をもった。つづけて、キーを叩いた。
「HMIライト？ 窓の外は太陽の光じゃないのか？」
「太陽の自然な光ではありません。これは造られた光。つまり電気による照明です。おそらくスタジオなどで使用されるHMIライトで、昼光色、5600Kに近い、窓からの光の再現が可能なものです」
ジャックはベンにいった。
「マーカスがザカリアはブルックリンだと言っていた。地図を開け」
と、その前に、といってジャックは続けた。
「ジャスティンもオーウェンも助かっている。これだけのセッティングをしながら胸には当たっていない。ベン、偶然かどうかを訊いてくれ」
ベンはジャックの言葉を反復するようにキーを叩いた。答えは即答だった。
「発射装置の無線機器、天井からの角度などを考えると、意図的にはずしています」
「なぜだ？」
「即死した場合、畏怖を与えられません。それが復讐です」
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僕の新しい小説。
B♭ （ビーフラット）
舞台はニューヨークです。
6
www.flickr.com/photos/stealaway/54696914108/in/dateposted...
5
www.flickr.com/photos/stealaway/54686544606/in/dateposted...
4
www.flickr.com/photos/stealaway/54653035442/in/dateposted...
3
www.flickr.com/photos/stealaway/54639396885/in/dateposted...
2
www.flickr.com/photos/stealaway/54628511025/in/dateposted...
1
www.flickr.com/photos/stealaway/54599616429/in/dateposted...
Soundtrack.
music.apple.com/jp/playlist/b-my-novel-soundtrack/pl.u-47...
追記 この小説を多少説明しました。
youtu.be/3w65lqUF-YI?si=yG7qy6TPeCL9xRJV
メモ
1
「Bombay型（ボンベイ型、hh型）」
•特徴：通常のABO血液型を持たない（A、B、Oに分類されない）特殊な型。
•発見地：1952年、インド・ムンバイ（旧ボンベイ）で初めて確認。
•発生頻度：インドでは1万人に1人程度だが、世界的には約250万人に1人とも。
•輸血制限：同じBombay型しか輸血できない。
2
2024年ハーバード大学首席の卒業式スピーチ『知らないことの力』
youtu.be/SOUH8iVqSOI?si=Ju-Y728irtcWR71K
3
Shots fired at Trump rally
youtu.be/1ejfAkzjEhk?si=ASqJwEmkY-2rW_hT
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Pasque Flower
A ruddy kite guards the gate –
Where Danes, Romans stood to gloat
Before the Glead Hawks picked their brains –
Above his cairn of bleached bones.
Rabbit warrens undermine
Forgotten graves of slain men,
And Grim’s Ditch lies overgrown
With junipers on every groin.
Beyond the combe, torn by tilth,
A temple founders under turf
And lowly cowslips claim their geld,
Blooms the hue of soldiers’ gold.
There, pasque flowers’ knops and thrums
Raise blood and gilt to ancient drums.
Notes: Pasque flowers – now exceedingly rare downland plants – are reputed to mark the places where Danish or Roman blood was spilt. It is certainly true that they have a tendency to grow on ancient earthworks, although it is probable that this is simply because they favour ground that has long been undisturbed. The poem describes one such ancient landscape in the Berkshire Downs where pasque flowers may still be seen. Glead Hawk is the Cheshire name for the Red Kite, which also inhabits the downland combes. “Thrums” is Gerard’s word for the golden stamens, and “knops” are the heads that succeed the purple flowers. See Geoffrey Grigson, The Englishman’s Flora, pp. 42-44; Richard Mabey, Flora Britannica, p. 44; Francesca Greenoak, British Birds: Their Folklore, Names and Literature, p. 56.
For more of my botanical poems, see my collection here:
www.scribd.com/doc/29536650/A-Poet-s-Nosegay-A-Botanical-...
I Ask You
What scene would I want to be enveloped in
more than this one,
an ordinary night at the kitchen table,
floral wallpaper pressing in,
white cabinets full of glass,
the telephone silent,
a pen tilted back in my hand?
It gives me time to think
about all that is going on outside--
leaves gathering in corners,
lichen greening the high grey rocks,
while over the dunes the world sails on,
huge, ocean-going, history bubbling in its wake.
But beyond this table
there is nothing that I need,
not even a job that would allow me to row to work,
or a coffee-colored Aston Martin DB4
with cracked green leather seats.
No, it's all here,
the clear ovals of a glass of water,
a small crate of oranges, a book on Stalin,
not to mention the odd snarling fish
in a frame on the wall,
and the way these three candles--
each a different height--
are singing in perfect harmony.
So forgive me
if I lower my head now and listen
to the short bass candle as he takes a solo
while my heart
thrums under my shirt--
frog at the edge of a pond--
and my thoughts fly off to a province
made of one enormous sky
and about a million empty branches.
Billy Collins
Done in Ai, Finalized in Photoshop
As the sun bleeds into the synthetic horizon, a lone cybernetic sentinel stands vigil atop the jagged ridge—his body humming with energy, eyes fixed on the neon spires of the mega-city below. Highways of light coil like circuitry through the metropolis, converging around a colossal energy spire that pierces the sky like a signal to distant worlds.
The air thrums with unseen tension—this is not peace, but the calm before an evolutionary storm. Drones hum beneath the clouds. AI voices flicker through the ether. And in the silence, the sentinel waits—not for orders, but for a reckoning long prophesied.
"Echelon Dusk" is a glimpse into a world where the boundary between man and machine has long dissolved, and only echoes of purpose remain beneath the glow of post-human civilization.
Deafened by silence, ills seep through pore and follicle absorbed by grass and
root. Perfumed heather dances on the wind dueting with spring light. Unadulterated
air soothes the conscious mind, fresh and pure as water from upstream spring.
Deafened by silence, the nerves calm, knotted muscles relax, the whirling dynamo of
mind slows into forgotten state. Breathing deep in time with mountain thrum,
conscious thought floats past pine forest, tarn and glacial plain. Gently whispering.
Not deafened now but soothed and cosseted in its warm and welcoming glow. At one
with self and land in tune. Fading thoughts no more as dreams infuse the empty plain,
beauty and harmony intertwine bringing peace and sleep through natures wine.
I thought it fitting that the first image should be a joint effort, Sharon taking the image
and I'll provide the sleeping figure :) oh yes and the words
Having found some spare time the other night I spent it perusing a folder of photographs I took on a solo camping trip to Snowdonia in the summer of 2010 – one of the wettest summers the UK had experienced in years.
I'd eagerly set off on my mountain adventure with an agenda of locations I wanted to visit and the type of images I was after – fool! I arrived on the Sunday morning at the campsite to a heavy mizzle; the fact that there was no one else there should have been a warning of what was to come. By Monday morning the rain had turned into a steady downpour, and come Tuesday morning the rain fell from the sky like arrows of bitter disappointment, all my hopes for drier weather constantly mocked by their incessant clamouring to penetrate my tent. In my nylon castle, on an island of grass besieged on all sides by rapidly growing pools of water, and still the only 'happy' camper on the campsite, I sat and waited, my boredom broken only by pouring(!) over maps and guidebooks, further frustrating myself with thoughts of what might have been…but then, Wednesday morning came…no alarm clock needed, the sudden cessation of volleys of liquid arrows thrumming against my tent created a silence so unexpected and profound it even reached into my sleep and awoke me, a testament to just how used to the unrelenting wet, white noise I'd become.
So at 7.00am, bleary-eyed, with more than half my damp brain still asleep, I unzipped the sodden flysheet and looked out to see this passing by…
What followed were three excellent, Joker grin-inducing days of photography, ranging from LE's of waterfalls in full spate, to chaotic cloud vistas playing games of shadow dancing with the sun on the mountain tops.
Driving home in the evening after a daylong visit with my brother, I deliberately detour through Chana so I can take a quick look up and down the track to see if a train might be imminent. I'm thinking there's really not much chance of getting a shot tonight, as the sun has sunk below a bank of clouds on the horizon, but there's green on the main at the east end of the siding so I might as well hang around and see what shows up.
I wait; It's quiet out here in the farm country, except for occasional chatter from a couple of kids riding their bicycles up and down what passes for a main street. An elderly man appears in his front yard across the tracks and commences watering a beautiful flower garden in front of a tidy white house. A dog somewhere barks for a minute or two and then is silent. After a bit, a whistle to the west, a low thrumming sound, and then a distant headlight appears. It takes longer to reach me than I expect, but it soon becomes apparent the locomotives are laboring hard as they lift a loaded oil train up the grade to where I stand. As the head end thunders by, the engineer is sounding the whistle for County Road 4 just behind me, and then I watch the long worm of tank cars pass, wheels singing on ribbon rail with a gradually rising note as the train gains speed once over the hump.
The rear end passes, FRED blinks goodbye, silence returns to the little community. Life is good.
BNSF Aurora Subdivision
D7A_8856ef
One of the most fascinating things about the SNCF in the 1980s and 1990s was the freight scene. I spent a month in Montpellier in 1993 and an afternoon spent on the station could be pretty rewarding. SNCF doesn't really operate regular-headway passenger services (not outside Paris anyway) so quite often you'd get a few passenger trains within quite a short space of time then nothing scheduled for a while. At that point a flurry of freight activity would usually begin - van trains, container trains, wagonload freights or bulk trains of grain hoppers. By this point wagonload freight was fast disappearing in the UK, but it was still a big part of the French scene. Montpellier, despite not being a major destination for freight, had two small shunters ('locotracteurs' in French). The job of one of them was to pick up small handfuls of wagons dropped off a few times a week by passing freights, and trundle them up the line to outlying stations or factory sidings. These days wagonload freight is dying in France too, and this quintessentially French railway activity will soon be a thing of the past.
Montpellier's other locotracteur, a little Y7100, was usually employed shunting a small container terminal just west of the station. This was quite tucked away, but the thrum of the little shunter as it moved the container wagons back and forth was often heard. Every now and again the completed trains would be taken away by a Villeneuve BB7200.
Y7209, allocated to Beziers, is seen here going about its business in August 1993. A long time resident of the south of France, the condition of its paintwork bears witness to a life spent in the sunshine. Green with yellow lining was the old standard shunter colour scheme, which was being replaced by orange and brown. Southern-based locos tended to fade a bit, with the yellow paint on the green locos fading to the dull orange colour seen here, while locos in the new orange livery went a very strange peachy-pink hue after a few years. SNCF did in due course change the orange livery to a much stronger shade which was more durable.
Picture: Shelter Drawing, by Henry Moore, 1940.
Shelter Women
Breathing roots, blanket-barked,
knot-mouthed slumberers, dead things
on the edge of sentience - gnarled ones
in the groined earth, grit-ingrained,
webbed with mycelium: we are Fates
and fated, sculptural, immovable,
hollowed out and whole - shelter women,
wombed and wombing. Waking, we glare
into ghosts of echoes, our sockets
blaring - the world above, a clatter
of blind unknowing. Buildings broken,
buses overturned, Blitz-dazed streets:
these things come to us as a dumb,
encumbered thrumming, a rattling
of plumbing. We are knitters, nursers,
blank standers, watchers of nothing,
white nocturnals warding off the morning.
Poem by Giles Watson, 2013. Inspired by Henry Moore's 'Shelter Drawings', 1940.
in a café at milan's piazza del duomo, a moment of repose is captured: a milanese woman enjoys her morning espresso. the sharp contrast between her stylish leather jacket and the softness of her sip creates a snapshot of daily elegance. with sunglasses perched atop her head and a scarf adding a pop of color, she personifies the chic, unhurried coffee culture that is a signature of the city. this is milanese sophistication, an everyday ritual woven into the fabric of city life, a private interlude amidst the public thrum of a bustling square.
Having walked some distance from the entrance to Lathalmond museum, 'Berresfordsmotors', 'SemmyTrailer' and I were rewarded by the sight of this Eastern Scottish Seddon Pennine VII bowling along the open road... and not much else (all that exercise for newt! ;-) The well turned out Alexander Y type looked just right as it thrummed by, it's Gardner power unit making a pleasant change aurally to the more numerous visually similar Leopards.
In the quiet of the kitchen, before my four youngest awake. (My husband and oldest son are off to work-- still Christmas break for our son, so he gets to go to work with dad this week.) Our youngest four are still sleeping off their Ringing-In-The-New-Year midnight bedtime two nights ago, and the kitchen is quiet and the air is still, thrumming, though, with the potential of all that will take place today--the eating and learning and snuggling and laughing and mistakes and mending and growing and loving. The day awaits. Good morning, Lord.
2/365
Turkey mating game:
The male, approaching a female in a courtship ritual with two or more of his brothers, will blush brilliantly red and blue about his face and throat, fan his broad brown and white tail, lower his outspread wings and emit loud thrumming noises through his air sacks as he prances in a shuffling strut.
I discovered this technique recently and these are the snuggliest things that you will ever put on your hands.
* Darnall Station
Finally, at this 'wayside station', as it seems now, just a short distance from Sheffield, the platforms are empty, the last service to the east having just passed by, though no-one got on or off, the latter being very unlikely anyway, leaving the line clear for the Test Train to follow back towards Woodhouse. At left, once more, the two coaches in view are the blue 9806 Support Coach, an old Caledonian Sleeper Coach, No. 1-11 with in front, 999605, the Ultrasonic Test Coach #4, which is an ex-British Rail Mark I unit, No.562482, latterly, B.R. EMU 62482; part of the pantograph housing can be seen again, this time at the rear. A few seconds later, class 37, 37116 ex- D6816, comes into view, looking the 'bullish' part and thrumming along, its power now controlled from he D.B.S.O., 9714, at the front. This is the Network Rail Test Train, operated by Colas Rail with class 37, 37116, ex-D6816, now at the rear, with D.B.S.O. 9714 at the front on the 3Q35, from Barnetby, departing 07:45, Grimsby, Cleethorpes, Stallingborough, Wrawby Junction, Lincoln Central, Gainsborough, Retford, Woodhouse Junction, Sheffield(rev), Worksop, Clarborough, Gainsborough, Worksop, Dinnington Junction, Maltby Colliery, Belmont Down Reception, Doncaster Marshgate Junction, Adwick, Skellow Jn, Bentley and finally Doncaster West Yard, 40 minutes early, at 16:30..
This photo is missing a crucial element: as I enjoyed my Lancaster Bomber ale during a lull on Canada Day afternoon, I could hear the unmistakable thrum-thrum-thrum of the Rolls-Royce twin Merlin engines of a Lancaster bomber circling overhead. It was - legacy of death and destruction aside - a magical little moment.
* Stills video in two parts at Woodhouse & Beighton Station. 23Mby, it is 2mins 49secs long, so video can be watched within the Flickr interface.
* Woodhouse Station
Looking back to last Sunday and a recreational walk out in the area near Woodhouse & Beighton Stations, to check on the work which is on-going to remove 3 of the semaphore signalboxes in the area at Woodhouse Junction, Beighton Station and at Woodburn Junction. Today its a visit to the first two, the Woodhouse Station area followed by Beighton Station to have a look at the progress with the work, and its on-time, by the looks of things. The video, in two sections, with Woodhouse first, shows the area at the back of the station where the loco release is situated which allows them to run round their consist of wagons; and the loop road has been renewed which is very good new indeed. The road the traffic usually comes in on has been left in-situ on the far left in the first pictures, with the newly re-ballasted loop and railhead at centre. Further south, as the later pictures show, the centre siding has been completely removed as old coal and aggregate wagons no longer need to be store here; as many have now been scrapped. There was a time when all three of the Woodhouse Junction Sidings were full of coal hoppers, with siding 1(A) and 3(C) in use, see-
www.flickr.com/photos/daohaiku/41336089990/
all 3 sidings being used-
www.flickr.com/photos/daohaiku/31822144725/
and sidings 2(B) and 3(C) in use, its siding 2(B), at centre, which has been removed, although even in this September, 2015 shot, it was getting to be overgrown-
www.flickr.com/photos/imarch1/49549479241/
a nice picture that one, taken mid-afternoon. A video of the run-around operation, taken in December, 2107, can be viewed here-
www.flickr.com/photos/daohaiku/38450564484/
All so much activity, just a few short years ago, now its all over; though Network Rail must still have _some_ use for the sidings, as shown by the work which has been done here over the last few weeks. The run-around loop of course is part of what was left of the station goods line which passed behind the station on the down side, there was a similar line at the other side of the formation, behind the other station building. The video shows the run-around buffer stop and, due to the weeks long work being undertaken here, there are a couple of refreshment cabins for the local personnel, over on the fat left next to the end of the line. The view the other way over the station site from the loop line end shows the amount of work which has been carried out, an M.A.S. signal with 2 divergence 'feathers' on the far left, a new signal & control cable trunking channel has been laid through the site from Woodburn Junction all the way down to Woodhouse Junction box in the distance. The old wooden telegraph pole with old lamp atop hasn't been touched and stands at centre; these things never seem to figure in the plans when refurbishment takes place, thankfully!
The view along the Lincoln Lines back to the north though the station site is a worthy shot, not traction of course, as the lines were under a Line Block until 12:49, when the up line was opened and a service, 2P14, ran from Sheffield to Lincoln Central. A bus service had been running both ways until that time, the down Line Block the other way wasn't lifted until 14:28 when the first Lincoln service, 2P21, ran to Sheffield normally. The line curves the the right, in the picture of Woodhouse Station, and just a little way ahead was the last of the Woodhead O.H.L. Stanchion posts, marking the end of the electrified system. Running around 84 minutes late, fortunately for me, a track machine which had been working away to the south near Woodhouse Junction, 'thrummed' into life and started to approach, just as I was leaving to head off to Beighton Station. Seen here having rumbled up from Woodhouse is a VolkerRail, 'B41 UE', 'On-Track Machine', this one DR75401 and is on the return run having come in late the previous night, now on the 6J38, Woodhouse Junction Sidings via Sheffield, to the Chesterfield Down Sidings. After Sheffield, during the short distance south to Chesterfield, it managed to pick up another 45 minute delay, arriving in the sidings 129 minute late.. The unit paused at the platform end and there was a crew change-over after which, 5 or so minutes later, it set off towards Woodburn Junction. At left, in the second shot of the unit, there is a bagged up, low-level post carrying what is presumably a telephone possibly for a driver on the up-line wishing to contact York Control, which is who will be responsible for all this, once the semaphore signals have gone! Taking shots of the unit passing through the station wasn't easy at this time of day, with the sun directly overhead and above the station roof, still a worthy capture of the only traction passing through in the last 12 hours, the last passenger train, 2P92, the evening before ran through at 23:50 from Lincoln Central to Sheffield. The VolkerRail unit had come into the area from Retford Down Sidings via a reversal at Sheffield, at 00:25. Finally from this section, the last 4 shots show the scene as it looked to the south and the Woodhouse Junction signalbox, the second of which shows the VolkerRail unit parked up outside the box with one of the crew standing alongside. Woodhouse Junction box is due to be stood-down the week following the Beighton box, around the 21st March... Woodburn will follow soon after ... The views also clearly show the bare track-bed of the removed No.2 siding road and on the left of that the No.3 road, now relaid with new rail-head and ballast, si its future looks secure. The 3 ground-disk signals are still extant, the middle one now redundant of course, the other two, presumably will be replaced with colour-light equivalents, during the signalling replacement. The Network Rail compound is in the area between the Lincoln lines on the left and the lines to Beighton Station and Junction, on the right; there is an old Woodhead OHL stanchion support still in the yard, not quite sure what use would be made of that these days. The final shot show a wide angle view of the new track layout with the new clear centre track-bed and just the 4 lines, main passenger on the left and the remaining sidings on the right; in the past there were even more sidings over on the far right in the trees, these have been long gone...
* Beighton Station
After the last shot of the new layout to the sidings at Woodhouse, a jaunt down to the Beighton Station box to see what was to be seen. Network Rail have now closed Rotherham Road over the level crossing, from 8am 6th March, the previous day, until Monday, 22nd March in just over two weeks time.. The first shot is how the area looked on arrival with only foot traffic allowed over the crossing, and two 'sentry-posts' at either side to make sure folk were directed correctly. A lot of 'new stuff' has been deposited about the area, though the view south to Beighton Junction, in the second picture, belies any activity is going on at all, apart from the telling sight of the portable fence sections and the coil of conduit pipe! The Beighton Box has been around a long time, since the station opened here in 1893, the station was closed to passengers in 1954 and subsequently demolished, no sign of any of it now remains. Beighton goods yard was on the right of the box looking north and it had extensive sidings and, also, a connection to the industrial site over the other side of the River Rother. A single line left the main south-bound line, north of the box and headed directly north-east to pass over a single track bridge over the River Rother. As it turns out, the bridge deck is still in place, and has been featured on these pages before, but there are also a couple of shots of it, taken during the foray last weekend, in good light, and with little greenery present, still passing over the Rother. The area at the other side has now filled up with new industrial businesses replacing what used to be the 'Crown Paper Mill', the 'Beighton Flour Mill' and, off Rotherham Road, the 'Railway Inn', all now long gone... I guess the bridge deck will remain, there seems little point in trying to remove it for no obvious reason. There were a good crowd of personnel about the place, all seemingly friendly and this marked the last weekend before the final removal of the box. I was informed earlier that the grey cabins, seen at the other side of the 130 year old Box, will replace the Box when it is demolished; in fact tonight, a piece on the local station 'Look North' featured this as a worthy piece of reportable news .. .will download ait tomorrow. For now, over the weekend, the two large relay cabins will take the place of the Box, control being in the hands of the York Railway Operating Centre, R.O.C., after which there will be automation, no manual presence and no more semaphores, though these are further south in the Woodhouse Junction area, they will be removed by the end of this month..
More shots will follow after this weekend's recreational walking endeavours...
“Oh, God of trains and all that is sacred,” I prayed. “Please don’t let an eastbound train come at exactly the wrong moment and block my dream shot.” And I waited. One, two, three westbound freights, along with an eastbound intermodal. An hour passed. Then two. I heard another set of prime movers thrumming to the west, working hard—another approaching eastbounder. Please, just scoot by quickly. Stay out of my way. Around the bend the train rolled. Oh no! Dim headlights. That could only mean one thing: an oncoming train. Oh, please just be another freight. I turned to spy the westbound headlights, emerging through trees as the train rounded a graceful bend. And there she was, decked out in Tuscan Red with gold accents, the train I took off work early to photograph, pulled by the famed Pennsy E8s. My planned shot now blocked by passing double stack containers, I had to act quickly. I darted up the road to the center of the overpass and climbed up the chain link fence high enough to get my lens over. I didn’t get the shot I planned, but I am pretty pleased with how this turned out. Stay tuned for more; I have another date planned with the Tuscan Red lady in the morning at Beaver Falls.
The striking graphics of this cover make it my personal favorite. The pineapple pictured is actually a representation of the Dole Cannery's water tower, which was painted and trimmed to look like giant pineapple.
Thrum's Hawaiian Almanac & Standard Guide, 1967 Edition. I found three copies of this digest-sized book at the Kalihi Savers on O'ahu in 2000. The dates are from 1962, 1967, and 1974.
+++ DISCLAIMER +++
Nothing you see here is real, even though the model, the conversion or the presented background story might be based on historical facts. BEWARE!
Some background:
Tyne was the second of the five River-class light cruisers in the Royal Navy, which were introduced during the interwar period and played, after modifications, an active role in World War II, especially in the Mediterranean theatre of operations.
After the construction of the Danae-class cruiser, the demerits of the small cruiser concept became apparent. At the end of 1917, plans for an additional six C-class vessels, plus three new-design 7,200 ton-class scouting cruisers were shelved, in favor of an intermediate 5,500 ton-class vessel which could be used as both a long-range, high speed scout ship, and also as a command vessel for destroyer or submarine flotillas. The resulting River-class vessels were essentially enlarged versions of the Danae-class cruisers, with greater speed, range, and weaponry. With improvements in geared-turbine engine technology, the River-class vessels were capable of the high speed of 36 knots (67 km/h), and a range of 9,000 nmi (17,000 km) at 10 kn (12 mph; 19 km/h). The number of BL 6-inch (152.4 mm) L/45 Mark XII guns was increased from only three to seven in single mounts and provision was made for 48 naval mines. However, the four triple torpedo launchers on the Danae-class were reduced to just two double launchers, and the River-class remained highly deficient in anti-aircraft protection, with only two QF 3 in 20 cwt L/45 Mk. I and two QF 2-pounder L/39 Mk. II guns. A total of eight ships were ordered, but, with less pressure after the end of WWI, only five were built and finished.
The first River-class ship, H.M.S. “Trent”, was laid down in December 1918 and launched in August 1919. H.M.S. “Tyne” was the second cruiser of this new class, laid down 8 July 1919, launched 24 September 1920 and completed at Chatham Royal Dockyard 2 June 1922. Completed too late to see action in the First World War, “Tyne” was initially assigned to operate in the Baltic Sea against the Bolshevik revolutionaries in Russia. She was then on detached service in the West Indies. Following this assignment, she was attached to the 1st Light Cruiser Squadron of the Atlantic Fleet for the following five years. 1923/24, “Tyne” became a member of the Cruise of the Special Service Squadron, also known as the “Empire Cruise”. Following this tour, she went with the squadron to the Mediterranean for the next few years.
In May 1928 “Tyne” was assigned to the North America and West Indies Station, based at the Royal Naval Dockyard in Bermuda. She ran aground on 2 July 1928 on the Thrum Cap Shoal, 5 nautical miles (9.3 km) off Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and was badly damaged, suffering the breach of her engine room and of one of her boiler rooms. She was abandoned by most of her 445 crew, the officers remaining on board. Subsequently, all her guns and torpedo tubes and much of her other equipment had to be removed to lighten her. She was finally refloated on 11 July 1928 and towed off by H.M.S. “Despatch” and several tugs. She was repaired throughout 1929 and then reduced to the reserve.
In 1930, however, due to a shortage of ships at foreign theatres of operation, she was reactivated and transferred back to the America and West Indies Station. During 1931-1933 she served with the South American Division, and in 1934 she relieved the cruiser “Curlew” in the Mediterranean and was reassigned to the 3rd Cruiser Squadron. In 1935 she returned to Britain to be paid off into the reserve, but “Tyne” was kept active in British coastal waters for cadet training.
On the outbreak of the Second World War, “Tyne” was recommissioned and thoroughly modernized, since the original armament and other equipment had become obsolete by 1939. All five River-class ships were re-designed as light trade protection cruisers and were outfitted with new, state-of-the-art equipment and armament, including six new and very compact turrets. Pairs were placed at the bow and at the stern each, with another two placed singly at port and starboard amidships. Each was armed with twin 5.25-inch (133 mm) guns in high angle mountings. These new, quick-firing weapons were primarily surface weapons, but it was intended to fire the heaviest shell suitable for anti-aircraft defense, so that the ships could be used for convoy protection from aerial attacks.
The ballistic performance of the QF 5.25 was very good, with a maximum range of 24,070 yd (22,010 m) at 45 degrees with an 80 lb (36.3 kg) HE shell. In comparison, the contemporary French 138 mm (5.4 in) Mle 1934 guns as used on the Mogador-class destroyers had a maximum range of 21,872 yards (20,000 m) at 30 degrees with an 88 lb (39.9 kg) SAP shell, and the Italian 135/45 mm gun as used on the Capitani Romani-class cruisers had a maximum range of 21,435 yards (19,600 m) at 45 degrees with a 72.1 lb (32.7 kg) AP shell.
The new turrets were far more modern in design than previous light cruiser turrets and offered efficient loading up to 70 degrees to provide the intended dual-purpose capability. Furthermore, “Tyne” was, like its revamped sister ships, outfitted with four twin QF 2-pounder (40 mm) "pom-poms" and a pair of triple 21-inch (533 mm) torpedo tube launchers, mounted under the main deck. The latter carried a steam catapult for a reconnaissance waterplane, initially a Fairey Swordfish on floats but later replaced by a Supermarine Walrus amphibious flying boat. The depth charge racks were augmented by two new launchers.
After her modifications at Portsmouth Royal Dockyard, field tests in the Channel and receiving a light disruptive Admiralty paint scheme, “Tyne” joined the 2nd Cruiser Squadron, escorting convoys to Scandinavia and engaged in the hunt for the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. After the Norwegian Campaign she participated in the operations hunting the German battleship Bismarck and, together with the cruiser “Kenya”, intercepted one of the German supply ships, “Belchen”, on 3 June 1941.
Between July and August 1941, as part of Force K with the Home Fleet, she was involved in “Operation Gauntlet”, with operations to Spitzbergen and Bear Island. After one of these sorties, in company with the cruiser “Nigeria”, she intercepted a German troop convoy off Northern Norway, and the German ship “Bremse” was sunk. Later that year she was transferred to the Mediterranean and arrived in Alexandria on 21 October 1941 to join a new Force K, where the ship received a new high-contrast paint scheme, typical for this theatre of operations.
On 9 November 1941, Force K, consisting of “Tyne”,”Aurora”, “Penelope”, “Lance” and “Lively”, she was involved in the destruction of the Beta Convoy. In the resulting battle the Italian destroyer “Fulmine” was sunk, as well as the German transports “Duisburg” and “San Marco”, the Italian transports “Maria”, “Sagitta” and “Rina Corrado”, and the Italian “Conte di Misurata” and “Minatitlan”. The Italian destroyers “Grecale” and “Euro” were damaged.
On 24 November Force K, intercepted an Axis convoy about 100 nautical miles west of Crete. The Axis convoy was bound from the Aegean to Benghazi. The two German transports in the convoy, “Maritza” and “Procida”, were both sunk by H.M.S. “Penelope” and H.M.S. “Lively” despite the presence of the Italian torpedo boats “Lupo” and “Cassiopea”. On 1 December 1941 Force K, with “Tyne”, “Penelope” and ”Lively”, attacked the Mantovani Convoy. The Italian destroyer “Alvise Da Mosto” and the sole cargo ship “Mantovani” were sunk. H.M.S. “Tyne” next participated in the First Battle of Sirte on 17 December 1941. On 19 December, while steaming off Tripoli, she was heavily damaged in a mine field and was forced to retire to Malta for hull repairs.
After repairs, which lasted several months into summer 1942, she returned to service in the MTO and joined Force H. In November she became part of the Centre Task Force for the Landings in North Africa, Operation Torch. Off Oran, she engaged the Vichy French destroyers “Tramontane” and “Tornad”e on 8 November 1942, damaging the former so badly that it had to be beached. The following day she badly damaged the destroyer “Épervier” and drove it ashore. By early December 1942 she was operating as part of Force Q at Bône against the Axis evacuation and supply convoys between Trapani and Tunis.
However, “Tyne” was hit on 20 December 1942 off Trapani (Sicily) by an air-dropped torpedo. She caught fire, had two of her turrets out of action and was badly flooded. Later that day she was attacked once more by German dive-bombers, and a fatal bomb hit at the ship’s stern eventually led to her loss the following day. 115 men were killed through the attacks, the rest, more than two-thirds of the crew, was rescued.
All River-class ships had a very active war career and proved to be satisfactory in service, even though they were hardly a match for full-fledged battleships and worked best in conjunction with other ships. Especially in the Mediterranean they were very effective in protecting crucial convoys to Malta and even managed to see off some ships of the Italian Royal Navy. However, their outdated WWI machinery became their Achilles heel and limited their potential, and the relatively light main guns lacked range and firepower to take on major enemy ships their own.
From 1940 on the ships were to be replaced by the much more modern and better-equipped new Dido-class cruisers, but a shortage of guns for them, due to difficulties in manufacturing them, delayed their introduction so that the River-class cruisers had to soldier on. Two ships, “Tyne” and “Thames”, were lost, and the three post-war survivors “Trent”, “Severn” and “Mersey”, were immediately put into reserve after the end of hostilities in Europe and quickly broken up.
General characteristics:
Displacement: 5,100 long tons (5,200 t) (standard)
Length: 500 ft (152.4 m)
Beam: 47 ft (14.2 m)
Draft: 16 ft (4.8 m)
Draught: 12 ft 6 in (3.8 m) (deep)
Armor: Belt: 64 mm (3 in), Deck: 29 mm (1 in)
Complement: 450
Propulsion:
12× Admiralty boilers with 4× geared steam turbines, developing 90,000 shp (67,000 kW)
and driving four shafts
Performance:
Top speed: 36 knots (67 km/h; 41 mph)
Range: 5,000 nmi (9,300 km; 5,800 mi) at 14 kn (26 km/h; 16 mph)
Armament (after conversion):
12× 5.25 guns (133 mm) 50 caliber guns in six twin turrets
4× twin QF 2-pounder (40 mm) "pom-pom" AA guns in powered mounts
2× triple 21-inch (533 mm) torpedo tubes
2× throwers and 2× racks astern with 48 depth charges
The kit and its assembly:
The Royal Navy’s River-class light cruisers never existed. These fictional interwar ships were based on the Dido-class cruisers’ concept, just placed in an earlier generation and realized on the basis of an old/outdated ship. Inspiration came with an aftermarket set of six 1:700 white metal turrets that I came across recently, and I wanted to use it to build something like the American Atlanta-class light cruisers with a specialized AA armament.
However, this armament called for a suitable and bigger hull than my former destroyer builds, and I was eventually able to hunt down a cheap Tamiya kit of a Japanese Kuma-class light cruiser as starting point. It was perfect in size (almost exactly as big as a Dido-class cruiser!), shape and time frame, even though I I basically only used the kit’s single-piece hull as starting point. I had to modify the superstructures thoroughly to adapt the Japanese ship to the new role and also to a more Western layout and silhouette.
For instance, the typically Japanese tall “pagoda” bridge/command section of that era had to disappear, and I changed the superstructures almost completely, because the new twin turrets needed much more space than the small single guns of the Kuma cruiser. I also wanted to place them at different levels, and this called for suitable staggered platforms, too.
Initially there was the plan to mount the six turrets in groups of three at both bow and stern, but it was soon clear that this would not work – this arrangement would have been too long and too high, too, so that I went with two staggered pairs. I also wanted to give the ship – unlike the American Atlanta-class ships – a catapult for an on-board aircraft, and this required some free space on deck.
With this framework I scratched new/additional superstructures, using leftover pieces from the two recently built Matchbox K-class destroyers and from a Revell H.M.S. Ark Royal carrier. Everything evolved through trial-and error, in an attempt to find a plausible layout for all the deck equipment. The lowered hull section for the Kuma-class’ front torpedo tubes was filled with a cabin and re-purposed for lifeboats. Then the initially continuous superstructure was split to make room for the steam catapult amidships at deck level. The rear turrets eventually found their final places on a separate superstructure that would also carry the secondary mast and the crane for the floatplane, and I mounted the last two turrets in lateral positions (again somewhat inspired by the Atlanta-class arrangement with similar positions), above the Kuma-class’ openings for the rear torpedo launch tubes. These did not make sense at this position anymore, so that the OOB openings were closed/filled and moved further forward, under the new “flight deck”. Some PSR had to be done, too, in order to blend some disparate donor parts and fill the worst gaps. Therefore, the finish is certainly not as crisp as an OOB model – but I think that these flaws remained on an acceptable level.
Once the general deck layout had been settled, detail work began. This included a re-arrangement of bridge, masts and funnels, and the main deck had to offer enough space for the re-located catapult, together with the turrets in the side positions, lifeboats and AA stations, which found their place at deck level and in two twin alcoves in higher positions. Fiddly stuff, and I must admit that “creating” such a battleship is conceptually not easy.
The aircraft on board is actually the OOB Kawanishi E7K floatplane from the Kuma-class cruiser kit – but it looks similar enough to a Swordfish that this illusion could be easily supported with a suitable paint scheme.
Painting and markings:
I used the opportunity to apply another typical Royal Navy paint scheme, a so-called “Alexandria-style” pattern. This was a high-contrast scheme, sometimes described as consisting of black and white, but it was typically made up from 507a (Dark Grey) and 507c (Light Grey). It had been christened after the dockyard where it had been initially applied, and it was actually not a defined pattern (like the Admiralty schemes, which had been designed at offices by people who frequently had no practical naval experience!), but rather a common but individual application of standard paints that had been in ample supply at most dockyards! The ships had to be painted with what was at hand, and so the disruptive scheme caught on and was applied, like Mountbatten Pink, to a considerable number of British ships operating in the MTO. This two-tone scheme was not intended to conceal the ships, but rather to confuse the observer concerning speed, direction and what the ship actually was.
The pattern I applied to the model was loosely based on what the cruiser H.M.S. Devonshire carried in 1941, a kind of zebra pattern with wide, well-defined block stripes. As a visual gimmick these stripes were kind of “mirrored” along a line on the hull, as if reflected by the water and therefore making assessing size or distance even more difficult.
The paints are Humbrol 147 (Light Grey, FS 36495) and 27 (Sea Grey). The deck was painted as if the wooden areas had not been overpainted yet and allowed to weather, so that the once-holystoned, yellow-ish light wood had become dull and rather grey-ish. I used Humbrol 168 (RAF Hemp) and Revell 87 (Beige) as basis, and some light shading with thinned sepia ink was done to enhance the wooden look – and it’s nice contrast to the rather cold, grey camouflage. Metal decks, turret tops and the bow area were painted with Revell 47, simulating 507b (Medium Grey). Areas around the bridge were painted with Humbrol 62 (Leather) to simulate Corticene coating.
I originally wanted to paint the model in separate elements before final assembly, but this was not possible due to the many adjustments. The model was slightly weathered with a highly thinned black ink wash. Some Sienna Brown water paint was used for rust stains here and there. Portholes along the hull and on the superstructures were created with a thin black felt tip pen. The same tool was used to paint the muzzles of the guns. The crisp black boot topping was easy to create through the kit’s separate waterline bottom – OOB it comes in red, and it just had to be re-painted.
The kit’s segments were sealed with a coat of acrylic matt varnish before final assembly. Finally, rigging with heated and extended dark grey sprue material was done and paper flags were added.
It is not obvious, but the fictional H.M.S. “Tyne” took more scratchwork and mods than one would expect – it was/is almost a scratch build on the basis of a stock cruiser hull. More or less, the whole superstructure was re-arranged and the whole armament is new, but I think that the outcome looks quite plausible. The camouflage – even though only consisting of two shades of grey - looks interesting, too, and I think that the confusing effect becomes obvious in some of the beauty pics.
Fishermen - doing what fishermen do I guess. Fantastic sea today. Woke us at three this morning crashing against the prom - we thought the neighbours were running up and down stairs. Amazing - hole house was thrumming.
Among my first experiments in watercolour illustrations for poems...
THE OWL
Y Dylluan
Fie! The handsome owl’s
Incessant speech, sick of soul
Stifles thought, prevents prayer
For every hour stars appear.
All last night I heard her weep
A sore lament to banish sleep.
A roost of bats her shelter
From rain and snow. I shudder
Each night, to hear her charm –
A chink of pennies – meaning harm.
Chieftains my eyelids: to obey
And close them, defeats me until day.
I lie awake, with fluttering heart
And wait for her to screech or hoot ,
Laugh or cry. My heart is wrung.
A pittance from false poet’s tongue.
Wretched zeal till break of day
Bids her groan till dawn grows grey.
I writhe tormented, wretched song –
‘Hw-ddy-hw’ – the whole night long.
She winds her horn to harry, haunt
And taunt the hounds of the Wild Hunt .
Dirty, shitten, with raucous throat,
Sharp as shards her baleful shout,
Berry-bellied, broad of brow,
Mouse devourer, ogling, brown,
Scheming, slatternly, dun and dull,
A shrivelled shriek from a domed skull
Throughout ten forests spilling fright,
Roebuck’s fetter, voice of night.
To ape a man’s, her flattened face,
Fiend of fowls, her form a farce .
No unclean bird would venture nigh
If once it heard her harping cry.
Philomel speaks less by day
Than she, who gossips night away.
When daylight comes, warmth to follow,
She sticks her head into a hollow.
The bird of Gwyn ap Nudd, her shriek
Bids hounds of Annwn not to shirk.
Lunatic owl! To robbers sing!
A curse upon your tongue and wing!
This song and spell I make, to scare
The owl who lurks within her lair.
Though frost is falling, I conspire
To fill each ivied hole with fire.
- Dafydd ap Gwilym, paraphrased by Giles Watson.
ASCALAPHUS
I see well by day, with my sulphured eyes.
I watched all as I loitered in the orchard,
Gazing over my shoulder. She would not touch
A crust of bread, yet stole my pomegranate,
Split its blushed and yellowed skin. Seven seeds,
Jellied in red flesh, passed her pursed lips.
Master was gratified, when I told him.
“My good gardener, perch on the rail
Of Hermes’ chariot, ride wind-ruffled to Eleusis.
Tell Demeter her daughter has feasted
On the food of the dead.” This I testified.
I am Hades’ servant, lurking underground,
Waiting for this stone to roll away.
I will burst out, on dark-wristed wings,
Wheeling in sunlight; I see well by day.
Poem by Giles Watson, 2004.
ANDRASTE
You flee in bulge-eyed terror, your underfur
Matted by the mess of human handling.
You are the sigil of the hunted, the glyph
Of the Roman woman skewered on a spear,
And the hounds’ feet beat the thrum
Of retribution. The spilling of your bowel
Prefigures revenge: the severed breasts
Stuffed in the mouths of the oppressor’s wife.
The knife slice is the same, the blood-spray
Just as red as woman’s blood, the death
Accompanied by the same unholy screams.
Or perhaps there were no hounds, and no knife
Either, but only Boudica’s trembling hand
And a wide swathe of darkness which was
Terror, and future, and the hope of escape.
Source material: Miranda Green, Celtic Goddesses, London, 1995, pp. 32-33. Andraste was the British goddess of war, venerated by Boudica. Before her attack on the Romans in London, Boudica performed a rite in honour of Andraste, releasing a wild hare, which may have been a symbol of the Romans themselves, hunted down by Boudica’s warriors. Green theorises that “it could also have represented darkness and therefore death and destruction”. When Boudica did reach London, she subjected the Roman women to the tortures described above, apparently offering them as sacrifices to Andraste, but it is also evident that these were also revenge-killings in response to the rape of British women by Roman soldiers.
Poem by Giles Watson, 2004.
we are sane!
not insane!
and the chorus says
"it's all quite normal... la-la-la"
and the chorus says
"it's all quite normal... la-la-la"
the choruses...
are happy as they know no different way
except what they've been told today
("left! right! left! right!")
accepting their limited 'truth' and blankly humming
we are sane!
III) Dictator's Excuse Me
and we are not to blame
we must protect the claim
praise those who hold power
they shall save the last hour
using sacred science
they can stamp out defiance
wheee...!
File #2
"Technician, we want you to build a component
for each of our workers, to be with them always,
at all time watch closely, so we can keep track of
their actions, their interests, their morals, their time out.
Some musak to maim them, some fear to contain them.
Policy will judge, them brute forces degrade them.
Practical behaviour, the cleanser, the saviour.
A private vocation has no sense of nation.
The maintenance of power can be so fulfilling,
just as long as all the slaves are willing.
So this is an order:
we must curb thought disorder.
With a miniature transmitter
we can pavlov the litter
and train it to do as we tell it,
state surgeon, the seed plant
thought soon get a new slant.
So tiny a dogma idea turn to quagmire,
thrum-humming transistor a brain wave insistor,
closed circuit hypnosis an inbuilt psychosis,
not one self expression deliberate supression.
A cycle to squeeze out anyone who we doubt
will must be pliable to be reliable."
tuned into the media system
picture getting hard to see
how did you end up as a prisoner
when you were supposed to be free?
oh, wouldn't you like to know?
lebensraum for megalomania
endless song with one refrain
all eyes fixed upon the conductor
baton taps inside the brain...
This was what I actually went out last Thursday to shoot, before I was lucky enough to come across drifting fog at sunset. I'd taken some shots here before completely by chance one night, when driving home and the sunset turned out nice, so I thought I'd investigate properly.
Turns out it's a lovely place to shoot. The coquet points almost directly towards the sunset at that point, and there is a deep, still pool to the right of the bridge which is full of fish and attracts photogenic fly fisherman.
I highly recommend it (and Thrum Mill) to anyone as a good location. Just off the road towards rothbury from the A697 (I think).
Canon 400d / Sigma 10-20mm / Cokin ND Grad
I bought this car Memorial Day weekend, 1999. I named her "Baby" while idling at a stoplight one day that first week; her engine had a rhythmic high-low thrum that sounded like a cat purring... a really BIG cat.
This made me think of "Bringing Up Baby," the Cary Grant-Katharine Hepburn "screwball comedy" in which Kate has a tame leopard named Baby.
For the last years that I had a daily commute, Baby was my daily driver. I went full-time remote in 2001, but several times a year I drove Baby from home near Portland, Oregon to the office in Mountain View, California, about 650 miles (a hair over 1000 km).
When we had to move from that house in 2016, Baby needed a few minor bits of repair, so I towed her to an Alfa Club member who works on cars in his home shop. And then... things happened.
The stars aligned, I drove out to the shop, and drove her home, about 160 km/100 miles to the Oregon Coast yesterday.
Many things were sun-damaged or oxidized during her long stay, but the engine is as magnificent as ever, the repaired clutch pedal is perfect... but mostly, this remains the most engaging, enjoyable, responsive and *balanced* sports car of the 25 or 30 I've owned. (The suspension is NOT stock Alfa soft, it has Bilsteins and some kind of lowering/stiffening springs.)
Now two projects combine: triaging the bits of Baby that we need to clean, refinish/refurbish, or replace, plus clearing out the garage (the little red-and-white shed at the far end of the image). We have a few months before the Oregon Coast rains start, so there's time, but we can't dawdle...
The Deluge
You’ve probably heard about
My tryst in that abundant
Bed of leaves, with cuckoo songs
And thrushes as assistants,
A fair girl bedded beside
Me. She lay and sighed, and bruised
Leaves of May in clenched fingers.
The whole thing was just flawless.
The auburn girl was caught out
Right at the climax, by Christ:
There came a great, violent gush,
A clap of thunder, a rush
Of pelting rain, a wild flash
Of lightning. Rent with a gash,
The sky shuddered, and the lass
Grew pale, tied on her head-dress
Hurriedly, ran for her life.
So did I. Love came to grief.
Then the flame-beaked thunder wrecked
Our bed of pleasure, and wrought
Destruction, like a crow
On carrion, struck a blow
Against love, blew through the ricks,
Bull-brazen, breaking whole rocks
To smithereens. Buellt burned
With bright lightning, embattled
By fury in a welter
And mounting walls of water.
There was a wild trumpet blast
Of solid rain, fit to burst
Apart the firmament. Stars
Were quenched. Whole dams hung ajar.
Fear made jelly of my knees;
Rain-squalls were thick as oak trees;
My hair askew. Claps fit to stun
Blew like powder from a gun,
And rancorous as a red
Witch beating basins, dread
Tattooed like a rattle-bag,
A carping crake, a vile hag.
Christ is bursting oak barrels
In the sky. There are battles
High among the cloud-turrets.
Rain cleaves rocks in cold torrents.
Shale cascades, castles clattering
To ground. A grim smattering
Of laughter rends like a drum
With its attack, and the thrum
Is like a gigantic sky-
Fart, done by a monster: die
Or run. It shakes a hard fist
At lovers. Who would dare tryst
Under it? We were alone
With that slug of thunder, thrown
Into terror. Bellowing
Surrounded us. We’re following
Our instincts. We run away
When the ass-clouds belch and bray.
Thunder is evil, love weak.
The flood came and did its work,
The wet churl. Lust is a storm.
Neither she nor I can swim.
Poem attributed to Dafydd ap Gwilym (Welsh, fourteenth century), paraphrased by Giles Watson. Buellt is in southern Powys, on the English border, and was where Llywelyn ap Gruffudd pursued his last campaign before his death in 1282. Dafydd is technologically on-the-ball with his reference to gunpowder, which must have arrived in Wales within his lifetime or just before it. A rattle-bag is a skin filled with stones, used for scaring birds away from crops. The call of the corncrake is not dissimilar. The shifts in tense are characteristic of a dramatizing tendency in late-mediaeval poetry. Although Dafydd’s authorship is contested, the cleverness of the extended metaphor, which seems to compare the deluge to a simultaneous orgasm, is typical of his work. The picture shows the River Thames in flood at Buscot, Oxfordshire.
Reading: www.youtube.com/watch?v=erShuW4D694
55014 THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON'S REGIMENT thrums away as it waits at Doncaster in the early hours of 26th April 1980 with 1A45 22:55 Newcastle - King’s Cross.
I'd positioned the tripod to catch the twin exhausts in the station light, but sadly failed to get the focusing right!
Zenit EM f/5.6 5 seconds Ektachrome 200
For everything you ever wanted to know about these magnificent machines, go to www.napier-chronicles.co.uk
JHE829L ERF - Gardiner 180 (1973) in livery of Thrums Haulage of Kirriemuir. Seen on the 2012 Ayrshire Road run en route to the Cumnock lunch stop on 7th July 2012.
Primula vulgaris (primrose, syn. P. acaulis (L.) Hill) is a species of flowering plant in the family Primulaceae, native to western and southern Europe (from the Faroe Islands and Norway south to Portugal, and east to Germany, Ukraine, the Crimea, and the Balkans), northwest Africa (Algeria), and southwest Asia (Turkey east to Iran). The common name is primrose, or occasionally common primrose or English primrose to distinguish it from other Primula species also called primroses.
It is a perennial growing 10–30 cm (4–12 in) tall, with a basal rosette of leaves which are more-or-less evergreen in favoured habitats.
The leaves are 5–25cm long and 2–6 cm broad, often heavily wrinkled, with an irregularly crenate to dentate margin, and a usually short leaf stem. The delicately scented flowers are 2–4 cm in diameter, borne singly on short slender stems.
The flowers are typically pale yellow, though white or pink forms are often seen in nature. The flowers are actinomorphic with a superior ovary which later forms a capsule opening by valves to release the small black seeds. The flowers are hermaphrodite but heterostylous; individual plants bear either pin flowers (longuistylous flower: with the capita of the style prominent) or thrum flowers (brevistylous flower: with the stamens prominent). Fertilisation can only take place between pin and thrum flowers. Pin-to-pin and thrum-to-thrum pollination is ineffective.
Thrum flower of primrose
The primrose is one of the earliest spring flowers in much of Europe. "Primrose" is ultimately from Old French primerose or medieval Latin prima rosa, meaning "first rose", though it is not closely related to the rose family Rosaceae.
For more information please visit en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primula_vulgaris
“Even stillness can be repurposed.”
The House of Stillness (Before the Casino)
Long before the Skyport thrummed with freighters and drone-laced air corridors, its uppermost level held something quieter: The House of Stillness—a Buddhist monastery built by exiled techno-monastics who believed serenity could survive the future.
Constructed with sacred geometry and starsteel joints, it was a place of elevated thought and engineered silence:
* Gravitation-softened meditation chambers
* Micro-etched sutras on thermal glass
* Chanting halls tuned to harmonic frequencies
The monks vanished without ceremony. The building did not.
After the Silence
Over the next several decades, it passed through flawed hands:
* A black-market auction house that folded before its second shipment
* A meditation-tech startup that claimed to “upgrade enlightenment” with neural implants and quietly disappeared after a failed investor demo
* A weapons broker who was outbid and outgunned
Each owner left less of a mark than the last. The structure endured. Waiting.
The Year of Transition
The Lotus Vault Casino was a failing, dust-cloaked relic—more echo than enterprise—barely clinging to the memory of its former purpose.
Vivienne was placed behind the bar by the Onboarding Authority—one of the faceless agencies that process Rift arrivals and assign provisional roles. Her file said “tavern owner.” Nothing flagged. No threats predicted.
They thought they were filling a vacancy. They were handing her the city.
She learned the room fast. Who paid attention. Who owed too much. Who thought they owned the place. She didn’t challenge. She curated. She poured the drinks, watched the flow of money and murmurs, and made notes in her head.
The first owner disappeared quietly. No one asked too hard. The second barely lasted a month. The third? Vivienne made her an offer: retire with grace, or be forgotten without it.
No violence. No coup. Just gravity.
By the end of that first year, the name “Ravenwood” wasn’t just on the deed. It was spoken in lower tones—carefully. She didn’t inherit power. She arranged it.
The Ravenwood Casino (Now)
The Ravenwood is no longer a place of prayer. It’s a three-story casino where fortunes change faster than the airlocks cycle—and control is an art form.
* First Floor: Gambling proper. Carefully monitored tables, discreet digital interfaces, and house odds that always seem just fair enough.
* Second Floor: Lounge and VIP room for deals best made out of view. Liquor smooth, conversation smoother, stakes unspoken.
* Third Floor: Vivienne’s domain. It’s not an office—it’s an overlook. Everything filtered up. Nothing escapes notice.
The original bones remain—sacred lines beneath synthetic polish. Vivienne fills the space completely. There are no echoes. No monks. No ghosts. Only Vivienne.
Sayings & Rumors
“If she smiles at you twice, you're either in deep... or already lost.”
“The house always wins. Especially when she’s not smiling.”
“They say she’s still waiting for someone. Just one person. You’ll know if it’s you.”
(The Ravenwood will be open August 16 2025 at NeoExtropia in the Sky Port Bury.)
I can already hear the ice in my mind, all these rocky rapids overflowing and slowly turning solid. It will be just seconds before the West Branch of Bear River end her final descent to join the rest, raging under the tidal town. I can fairly feel the thundering under my feet, a steady threatening thrumming, humming up through the Parker Road bridge. Resonance, the whole forest feels the draining, dripping trickles looking for the next nearest shortcut. Downstream is as free as it seems, deep, and calm, and drowning. You'll never know what water came from where.
November 4, 2018
Bear River, Nova Scotia
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In these hills, the lakes are dammed and funnelled through pipelines and turbines, running low with the power of water thrumming underfoot. I feel the draw like nothing could hold me, that I'll respond to gravity just as easily as I might condensation. See me in the clouds before long, surely. That's where my head is all through autumn. Every stage holds sway, from the early hints in September to the muddy depths of November – but I'm most moved right here at the peak of the season. I've never been away from Nova Scotia in this stretch, never missed my homeland when the best reason to be here was coming alive. It rattles out passion beyond contention; dares you to love leaving on its way out the door. All I've got now is a very brief grasp on what's slipping out sight. If I could hold on and slow the moment, I know it wouldn't mean as much.
October 22, 2023
Greenland, Nova Scotia
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I hope you've got a minute to read this.
It hits you like a bolt of creative lightning. You see a woman on the street, a model in a magazine, and suddenly the world goes still. It's not just the outfit itself; it's the way the emerald blouse drapes over her shoulders, the nonchalant allure that an oversized floppy sun hat adds, the symphony of textures – a chunky knit layered over a flowing skirt. A whirlwind of emotions swirls inside you: wonder at the ingenuity, a thrill of inspiration, and a flicker of envy, quickly eclipsed by a burning desire to make it your own.
This isn't mere copycatting; it's a spark igniting your own fashion flame. You see yourself in that outfit, a different version, perhaps bolder, perhaps more whimsical. It's a chance to rewrite your sartorial story, and the possibilities thrum with excitement. A mental shopping list forms, a treasure hunt for pieces to translate that inspiration into reality. It's more than just acquiring clothes; it's about capturing a feeling, a newfound confidence, a way of carrying yourself that the outfit embodies. The journey from inspiration to creation becomes a delightful dance, a testament to the transformative power of fashion.
All this happened to me this past weekend.
Picture this: a figure-hugging mini dress that shows off your curves, paired with comfy running shoes for a surprising twist. The dress could be a simple black number that lets your colorful sneakers take center stage, or it could be a bold patterned dress balanced by sleek, low-top runners. It's a cool, unexpected mix of sporty and sexy, perfect for a day out that's both stylish and comfy.
The newsprint dress, a siren song of curves, clung to my every form. Yet, a rebellious spirit whispered defiance. Today, it wouldn't dance with stilettos, but with the fleet-footed freedom of running shoes. A pilgrimage to the store I embarked upon, a quest not for jewels, but for the perfect pair of athletic wings. Thus, the very dress that earlier whispered elegance, now thrummed with a pulse of the unexpected. A testament, not to the power of the garment, but to the woman who breathes life into it, transforming the simple into a symphony of contrasting styles. This dress, a chameleon of possibility, waits for my next whim, its true beauty unveiled not by its form, but by the spirit it adorns.
Pattern: Thrummed Mittens designed by Jennifer L. Appleby
Pattern Source: Interweave Knits, Winter 2006
Yarn: Patons Classic Wool Merino in Grey Mix, 1 skein; approximately 2 oz Merino Top roving (1 oz each color, pink and purple)
Needles: US6 and US7 double pointed needles
This is the guts of a thrummed mitten. It is sooo soft and warm! My thrums may be a little long, but I am not too worried because I am sure they'll all felt together eventually anyways. blogged
+++ DISCLAIMER +++
Nothing you see here is real, even though the model, the conversion or the presented background story might be based on historical facts. BEWARE!
Some background:
Tyne was the second of the five River-class light cruisers in the Royal Navy, which were introduced during the interwar period and played, after modifications, an active role in World War II, especially in the Mediterranean theatre of operations.
After the construction of the Danae-class cruiser, the demerits of the small cruiser concept became apparent. At the end of 1917, plans for an additional six C-class vessels, plus three new-design 7,200 ton-class scouting cruisers were shelved, in favor of an intermediate 5,500 ton-class vessel which could be used as both a long-range, high speed scout ship, and also as a command vessel for destroyer or submarine flotillas. The resulting River-class vessels were essentially enlarged versions of the Danae-class cruisers, with greater speed, range, and weaponry. With improvements in geared-turbine engine technology, the River-class vessels were capable of the high speed of 36 knots (67 km/h), and a range of 9,000 nmi (17,000 km) at 10 kn (12 mph; 19 km/h). The number of BL 6-inch (152.4 mm) L/45 Mark XII guns was increased from only three to seven in single mounts and provision was made for 48 naval mines. However, the four triple torpedo launchers on the Danae-class were reduced to just two double launchers, and the River-class remained highly deficient in anti-aircraft protection, with only two QF 3 in 20 cwt L/45 Mk. I and two QF 2-pounder L/39 Mk. II guns. A total of eight ships were ordered, but, with less pressure after the end of WWI, only five were built and finished.
The first River-class ship, H.M.S. “Trent”, was laid down in December 1918 and launched in August 1919. H.M.S. “Tyne” was the second cruiser of this new class, laid down 8 July 1919, launched 24 September 1920 and completed at Chatham Royal Dockyard 2 June 1922. Completed too late to see action in the First World War, “Tyne” was initially assigned to operate in the Baltic Sea against the Bolshevik revolutionaries in Russia. She was then on detached service in the West Indies. Following this assignment, she was attached to the 1st Light Cruiser Squadron of the Atlantic Fleet for the following five years. 1923/24, “Tyne” became a member of the Cruise of the Special Service Squadron, also known as the “Empire Cruise”. Following this tour, she went with the squadron to the Mediterranean for the next few years.
In May 1928 “Tyne” was assigned to the North America and West Indies Station, based at the Royal Naval Dockyard in Bermuda. She ran aground on 2 July 1928 on the Thrum Cap Shoal, 5 nautical miles (9.3 km) off Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and was badly damaged, suffering the breach of her engine room and of one of her boiler rooms. She was abandoned by most of her 445 crew, the officers remaining on board. Subsequently, all her guns and torpedo tubes and much of her other equipment had to be removed to lighten her. She was finally refloated on 11 July 1928 and towed off by H.M.S. “Despatch” and several tugs. She was repaired throughout 1929 and then reduced to the reserve.
In 1930, however, due to a shortage of ships at foreign theatres of operation, she was reactivated and transferred back to the America and West Indies Station. During 1931-1933 she served with the South American Division, and in 1934 she relieved the cruiser “Curlew” in the Mediterranean and was reassigned to the 3rd Cruiser Squadron. In 1935 she returned to Britain to be paid off into the reserve, but “Tyne” was kept active in British coastal waters for cadet training.
On the outbreak of the Second World War, “Tyne” was recommissioned and thoroughly modernized, since the original armament and other equipment had become obsolete by 1939. All five River-class ships were re-designed as light trade protection cruisers and were outfitted with new, state-of-the-art equipment and armament, including six new and very compact turrets. Pairs were placed at the bow and at the stern each, with another two placed singly at port and starboard amidships. Each was armed with twin 5.25-inch (133 mm) guns in high angle mountings. These new, quick-firing weapons were primarily surface weapons, but it was intended to fire the heaviest shell suitable for anti-aircraft defense, so that the ships could be used for convoy protection from aerial attacks.
The ballistic performance of the QF 5.25 was very good, with a maximum range of 24,070 yd (22,010 m) at 45 degrees with an 80 lb (36.3 kg) HE shell. In comparison, the contemporary French 138 mm (5.4 in) Mle 1934 guns as used on the Mogador-class destroyers had a maximum range of 21,872 yards (20,000 m) at 30 degrees with an 88 lb (39.9 kg) SAP shell, and the Italian 135/45 mm gun as used on the Capitani Romani-class cruisers had a maximum range of 21,435 yards (19,600 m) at 45 degrees with a 72.1 lb (32.7 kg) AP shell.
The new turrets were far more modern in design than previous light cruiser turrets and offered efficient loading up to 70 degrees to provide the intended dual-purpose capability. Furthermore, “Tyne” was, like its revamped sister ships, outfitted with four twin QF 2-pounder (40 mm) "pom-poms" and a pair of triple 21-inch (533 mm) torpedo tube launchers, mounted under the main deck. The latter carried a steam catapult for a reconnaissance waterplane, initially a Fairey Swordfish on floats but later replaced by a Supermarine Walrus amphibious flying boat. The depth charge racks were augmented by two new launchers.
After her modifications at Portsmouth Royal Dockyard, field tests in the Channel and receiving a light disruptive Admiralty paint scheme, “Tyne” joined the 2nd Cruiser Squadron, escorting convoys to Scandinavia and engaged in the hunt for the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. After the Norwegian Campaign she participated in the operations hunting the German battleship Bismarck and, together with the cruiser “Kenya”, intercepted one of the German supply ships, “Belchen”, on 3 June 1941.
Between July and August 1941, as part of Force K with the Home Fleet, she was involved in “Operation Gauntlet”, with operations to Spitzbergen and Bear Island. After one of these sorties, in company with the cruiser “Nigeria”, she intercepted a German troop convoy off Northern Norway, and the German ship “Bremse” was sunk. Later that year she was transferred to the Mediterranean and arrived in Alexandria on 21 October 1941 to join a new Force K, where the ship received a new high-contrast paint scheme, typical for this theatre of operations.
On 9 November 1941, Force K, consisting of “Tyne”,”Aurora”, “Penelope”, “Lance” and “Lively”, she was involved in the destruction of the Beta Convoy. In the resulting battle the Italian destroyer “Fulmine” was sunk, as well as the German transports “Duisburg” and “San Marco”, the Italian transports “Maria”, “Sagitta” and “Rina Corrado”, and the Italian “Conte di Misurata” and “Minatitlan”. The Italian destroyers “Grecale” and “Euro” were damaged.
On 24 November Force K, intercepted an Axis convoy about 100 nautical miles west of Crete. The Axis convoy was bound from the Aegean to Benghazi. The two German transports in the convoy, “Maritza” and “Procida”, were both sunk by H.M.S. “Penelope” and H.M.S. “Lively” despite the presence of the Italian torpedo boats “Lupo” and “Cassiopea”. On 1 December 1941 Force K, with “Tyne”, “Penelope” and ”Lively”, attacked the Mantovani Convoy. The Italian destroyer “Alvise Da Mosto” and the sole cargo ship “Mantovani” were sunk. H.M.S. “Tyne” next participated in the First Battle of Sirte on 17 December 1941. On 19 December, while steaming off Tripoli, she was heavily damaged in a mine field and was forced to retire to Malta for hull repairs.
After repairs, which lasted several months into summer 1942, she returned to service in the MTO and joined Force H. In November she became part of the Centre Task Force for the Landings in North Africa, Operation Torch. Off Oran, she engaged the Vichy French destroyers “Tramontane” and “Tornad”e on 8 November 1942, damaging the former so badly that it had to be beached. The following day she badly damaged the destroyer “Épervier” and drove it ashore. By early December 1942 she was operating as part of Force Q at Bône against the Axis evacuation and supply convoys between Trapani and Tunis.
However, “Tyne” was hit on 20 December 1942 off Trapani (Sicily) by an air-dropped torpedo. She caught fire, had two of her turrets out of action and was badly flooded. Later that day she was attacked once more by German dive-bombers, and a fatal bomb hit at the ship’s stern eventually led to her loss the following day. 115 men were killed through the attacks, the rest, more than two-thirds of the crew, was rescued.
All River-class ships had a very active war career and proved to be satisfactory in service, even though they were hardly a match for full-fledged battleships and worked best in conjunction with other ships. Especially in the Mediterranean they were very effective in protecting crucial convoys to Malta and even managed to see off some ships of the Italian Royal Navy. However, their outdated WWI machinery became their Achilles heel and limited their potential, and the relatively light main guns lacked range and firepower to take on major enemy ships their own.
From 1940 on the ships were to be replaced by the much more modern and better-equipped new Dido-class cruisers, but a shortage of guns for them, due to difficulties in manufacturing them, delayed their introduction so that the River-class cruisers had to soldier on. Two ships, “Tyne” and “Thames”, were lost, and the three post-war survivors “Trent”, “Severn” and “Mersey”, were immediately put into reserve after the end of hostilities in Europe and quickly broken up.
General characteristics:
Displacement: 5,100 long tons (5,200 t) (standard)
Length: 500 ft (152.4 m)
Beam: 47 ft (14.2 m)
Draft: 16 ft (4.8 m)
Draught: 12 ft 6 in (3.8 m) (deep)
Armor: Belt: 64 mm (3 in), Deck: 29 mm (1 in)
Complement: 450
Propulsion:
12× Admiralty boilers with 4× geared steam turbines, developing 90,000 shp (67,000 kW)
and driving four shafts
Performance:
Top speed: 36 knots (67 km/h; 41 mph)
Range: 5,000 nmi (9,300 km; 5,800 mi) at 14 kn (26 km/h; 16 mph)
Armament (after conversion):
12× 5.25 guns (133 mm) 50 caliber guns in six twin turrets
4× twin QF 2-pounder (40 mm) "pom-pom" AA guns in powered mounts
2× triple 21-inch (533 mm) torpedo tubes
2× throwers and 2× racks astern with 48 depth charges
The kit and its assembly:
The Royal Navy’s River-class light cruisers never existed. These fictional interwar ships were based on the Dido-class cruisers’ concept, just placed in an earlier generation and realized on the basis of an old/outdated ship. Inspiration came with an aftermarket set of six 1:700 white metal turrets that I came across recently, and I wanted to use it to build something like the American Atlanta-class light cruisers with a specialized AA armament.
However, this armament called for a suitable and bigger hull than my former destroyer builds, and I was eventually able to hunt down a cheap Tamiya kit of a Japanese Kuma-class light cruiser as starting point. It was perfect in size (almost exactly as big as a Dido-class cruiser!), shape and time frame, even though I I basically only used the kit’s single-piece hull as starting point. I had to modify the superstructures thoroughly to adapt the Japanese ship to the new role and also to a more Western layout and silhouette.
For instance, the typically Japanese tall “pagoda” bridge/command section of that era had to disappear, and I changed the superstructures almost completely, because the new twin turrets needed much more space than the small single guns of the Kuma cruiser. I also wanted to place them at different levels, and this called for suitable staggered platforms, too.
Initially there was the plan to mount the six turrets in groups of three at both bow and stern, but it was soon clear that this would not work – this arrangement would have been too long and too high, too, so that I went with two staggered pairs. I also wanted to give the ship – unlike the American Atlanta-class ships – a catapult for an on-board aircraft, and this required some free space on deck.
With this framework I scratched new/additional superstructures, using leftover pieces from the two recently built Matchbox K-class destroyers and from a Revell H.M.S. Ark Royal carrier. Everything evolved through trial-and error, in an attempt to find a plausible layout for all the deck equipment. The lowered hull section for the Kuma-class’ front torpedo tubes was filled with a cabin and re-purposed for lifeboats. Then the initially continuous superstructure was split to make room for the steam catapult amidships at deck level. The rear turrets eventually found their final places on a separate superstructure that would also carry the secondary mast and the crane for the floatplane, and I mounted the last two turrets in lateral positions (again somewhat inspired by the Atlanta-class arrangement with similar positions), above the Kuma-class’ openings for the rear torpedo launch tubes. These did not make sense at this position anymore, so that the OOB openings were closed/filled and moved further forward, under the new “flight deck”. Some PSR had to be done, too, in order to blend some disparate donor parts and fill the worst gaps. Therefore, the finish is certainly not as crisp as an OOB model – but I think that these flaws remained on an acceptable level.
Once the general deck layout had been settled, detail work began. This included a re-arrangement of bridge, masts and funnels, and the main deck had to offer enough space for the re-located catapult, together with the turrets in the side positions, lifeboats and AA stations, which found their place at deck level and in two twin alcoves in higher positions. Fiddly stuff, and I must admit that “creating” such a battleship is conceptually not easy.
The aircraft on board is actually the OOB Kawanishi E7K floatplane from the Kuma-class cruiser kit – but it looks similar enough to a Swordfish that this illusion could be easily supported with a suitable paint scheme.
Painting and markings:
I used the opportunity to apply another typical Royal Navy paint scheme, a so-called “Alexandria-style” pattern. This was a high-contrast scheme, sometimes described as consisting of black and white, but it was typically made up from 507a (Dark Grey) and 507c (Light Grey). It had been christened after the dockyard where it had been initially applied, and it was actually not a defined pattern (like the Admiralty schemes, which had been designed at offices by people who frequently had no practical naval experience!), but rather a common but individual application of standard paints that had been in ample supply at most dockyards! The ships had to be painted with what was at hand, and so the disruptive scheme caught on and was applied, like Mountbatten Pink, to a considerable number of British ships operating in the MTO. This two-tone scheme was not intended to conceal the ships, but rather to confuse the observer concerning speed, direction and what the ship actually was.
The pattern I applied to the model was loosely based on what the cruiser H.M.S. Devonshire carried in 1941, a kind of zebra pattern with wide, well-defined block stripes. As a visual gimmick these stripes were kind of “mirrored” along a line on the hull, as if reflected by the water and therefore making assessing size or distance even more difficult.
The paints are Humbrol 147 (Light Grey, FS 36495) and 27 (Sea Grey). The deck was painted as if the wooden areas had not been overpainted yet and allowed to weather, so that the once-holystoned, yellow-ish light wood had become dull and rather grey-ish. I used Humbrol 168 (RAF Hemp) and Revell 87 (Beige) as basis, and some light shading with thinned sepia ink was done to enhance the wooden look – and it’s nice contrast to the rather cold, grey camouflage. Metal decks, turret tops and the bow area were painted with Revell 47, simulating 507b (Medium Grey). Areas around the bridge were painted with Humbrol 62 (Leather) to simulate Corticene coating.
I originally wanted to paint the model in separate elements before final assembly, but this was not possible due to the many adjustments. The model was slightly weathered with a highly thinned black ink wash. Some Sienna Brown water paint was used for rust stains here and there. Portholes along the hull and on the superstructures were created with a thin black felt tip pen. The same tool was used to paint the muzzles of the guns. The crisp black boot topping was easy to create through the kit’s separate waterline bottom – OOB it comes in red, and it just had to be re-painted.
The kit’s segments were sealed with a coat of acrylic matt varnish before final assembly. Finally, rigging with heated and extended dark grey sprue material was done and paper flags were added.
It is not obvious, but the fictional H.M.S. “Tyne” took more scratchwork and mods than one would expect – it was/is almost a scratch build on the basis of a stock cruiser hull. More or less, the whole superstructure was re-arranged and the whole armament is new, but I think that the outcome looks quite plausible. The camouflage – even though only consisting of two shades of grey - looks interesting, too, and I think that the confusing effect becomes obvious in some of the beauty pics.
Wild Dreams of a New Beginning
There's a breathless hush on the freeway tonight
Beyond the ledges of concrete
restaurants fall into dreams
with candlelight couples
Lost Alexandria still burns
in a billion lightbulbs
Lives cross lives
idling at stoplights
Beyond the cloverleaf turnoffs
'Souls eat souls in the general emptiness'
A piano concerto comes out a kitchen window
A yogi speaks at Ojai
'It's all taking pace in one mind'
On the lawn among the trees
lovers are listening
for the master to tell them they are one
with the universe
Eyes smell flowers and become them
There's a deathless hush
on the freeway tonight
as a Pacific tidal wave a mile high
sweeps in
Los Angeles breathes its last gas
and sinks into the sea like the Titanic all lights lit
Nine minutes later Willa Cather's Nebraska
sinks with it
The sea comes over in Utah
Mormon tabernacles washed away like barnacles
Coyotes are confounded & swim nowhere
An orchestra onstage in Omaha
keeps on playing Handel's Water Music
Horns fill with water
ans bass players float away on their instruments
clutching them like lovers horizontal
Chicago's Loop becomes a rollercoaster
Skyscrapers filled like water glasses
Great Lakes mixed with Buddhist brine
Great Books watered down in Evanston
Milwaukee beer topped with sea foam
Beau Fleuve of Buffalo suddenly become salt
Manhatten Island swept clean in sixteen seconds
buried masts of Amsterdam arise
as the great wave sweeps on Eastward
to wash away over-age Camembert Europe
manhatta steaming in sea-vines
the washed land awakes again to wilderness
the only sound a vast thrumming of crickets
a cry of seabirds high over
in empty eternity
as the Hudson retakes its thickets
and Indians reclaim their canoes
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(Poet Laureate of San Francisco)
Assurance
You will never be alone, you hear so deep
a sound when autumn comes. Yellow
pulls across the hills and thrums,
or in the silence after lightning before it says
its names — and then the clouds’ wide-mouthed
apologies. You were aimed from birth:
you will never be alone. Rain
will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon,
long aisles — you never heard so deep a sound,
moss on rock, and years. You turn your head —
that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone.
The whole wide world pours down.
—William Stafford
*** Chapter 5 - παραμένω ***
There is no ferryman. Over the infamous River Styx, four carriers cross with neither toll nor care. It is, in no uncertain terms, a trespass, and Diana of Themyscira is well aware that Charon's disappearance is not a blessing in disguise to the expedition. If there is any grace for her only two friends in this place, Diana knows, it will need to be salvaged.
The princess sinks to one knee, and whispers to the magic water babbling beneath them all. An unsettled Baroness von Gunther demands she be restored to her feet. Her men practically march over Barbara——resolving to go around Epimetheus——and aim their weaponry at Diana's skull to motivate her; she stands, in her own time. She nervously wrings one of her bracers, and spots Barbara's discerning gaze: Indicative of the professor's forte having helped her, in part, to work out Diana's action.
"… It is the way of my kin, to take oaths on the body of Styx. To consecrate our resolution to the eldest of beings, and some believe, to better one's fortune in their trials."
Epimetheus' nods quicken. "That's right. Perhaps, I too might..?"
Diana holds up her hands tightly, to allay him. "No. I have tried the baroness' patience enough as it is. And in truth… it is a superstition more than anything."
"Really. That's the superstition," Barbara comments, eyeballing their present state of affairs. Her derision dries up in no time, in the face of the inescapably staggering kingdom they have fallen into.
"Would you look at this place?" she inhales.
Every facet of the domain, from the alarmingly base aspect of its watchtower, to its air, should shun a prudent being, but Hades flouts these worldly principles. It beckons, like the sirens in many a chronicled voyage, and it holds Barbara and the rest in cold arms. For a time. The railing under Barbara's elbows begins to sting, from an updraft coming off of the second river they have chosen to weather. The Pyriphlegethon arches its back, spewing magma in a near miss on the skiff's belly. If only to keep their minds off of the heat——as she may well have excused herself, if pressed——Barbara takes this moment to know her companions' thoughts.
"Diana?"
Before now, the Amazon has not heard the woman's voice without defenses in place.
"If any of us even live through this, who is this apple going to? How can we know ‘the fairest’ must be a woman?"
"I cannot believe that Eris could bring herself to devise a challenge suggesting otherwise," Diana grimly advises. "Even for her to delight in our preconceptions."
Epimetheus sits down, grabbing his legs. A few grunts later, an inspired look washes over him.
"The Golden Maidens. Of Hephaestus' forge? I have heard they are, flawless."
"Which one?" Barbara logically follows up with.
"Physical beauty led to ruin once already," Diana breaks it to him, tolerantly.
Epimetheus shrinks. "I—"
"Should've thought of that," Barbara intonates. "You'll get the next one, big man."
Crossing her arms, Diana elects to clue Barbara in. "Epimetheus making the choice is mandatory. He is Eris' champion."
"… I'm not laughing," Barbara warns.
"Everyone must be considered," Diana gives her cousin counsel, "immortal or not. Remember there are many faces of attraction, qualities that make one 'fair.'"
"It could be any one of the goddesses of justice," Barbara despairs. "How can there possibly be one answer?"
Diana steps aside, for Barbara alone to hear her. "I've long thought the puzzle a paradox. Would the one chosen, worthy to judge, not be ‘the fairest’ themselves?"
Barbara glances over the princess' shoulder. "Oh surely not."
"Marilyn Monroe," Epimetheus puts forth, to Barbara's pique.
"Physical beau—"
"She is a philanthropist," he frowns.
No sooner has the trio washed their hands of the conundrum, for now, than one mercenary shouts for the party to listen with him. The third river approaches. The thrumming, which is imminently to act as a dirge, is heard by all.
Reason has it that the contaminant over the water is too evocative to be fog; instead of being dispersed by the transports, it takes to them magnetically, scaling their hulls and worming over their rails. The ghostly residue sings a dreadful tune, like an ever-present chamber fraught with plague, just low enough and with such discontinuity that Barbara and the rest cannot hope to put it out of mind. Diana exchanges looks with Von Gunther, affirming her earlier directions, and with that, their trajectory slopes ever closer to the Cocytus' slick banks.
The hollow moan of the river is not what the adventurers have primarily been tracking, as they come to find. Further inland towards the dwelling of Hades, from across the flattest tract they have yet encountered, the most pervasive chorus of wails drifts to their sore ears. Cyber, whose augmented senses stand to be ravaged by this environment, roughly takes the controls from their pilot and propels the caravan into a maddening flight over the plains. The wild sobs, of course, only worsen. Her head set to burst from input, Cyber doubles over the throttle in a stupor, cranking it almost to its breaking point. When from out of the dark, a tall, bent shape whooshes past the port side and overhead, nearly decapitating the men on the bow, Von Gunther barks for Cyber to be removed. No one volunteers, until Diana bolts to the deranged woman, wrapping hands around her enemy's and throwing back the lever about to doom the transport. The line of skiffs lurches to a halt.
Cyber regains her bearings, instinctively fighting Diana's control, but neither one has the fortitude for this dance. They keep one another in a lock, finding their breath while slowly deescalating. Diana looks away, ahead of them; Cyber continues staring at the ship's savior, until the cacophony catches back up with her. It forces her to stoop in full surrender, and without pretense or posture, without thinking much at all, decently, Diana takes her shoulder.
Von Gunther and most others have white-knuckle holds any part of the sled convenient to them. Same as her guards, Barbara had dropped to the deck at the close call. She twists her head to see Epimetheus stood straight, looking prepared for incoming danger and, notably, not as if some had recently grazed his hair.
"You might've been… oh never mind," Barbara relents, dusting herself off.
Epimetheus, bewildered by this concern, pats her arm, doubling the bewilderment aboard. He trots off to where he last saw Diana.
The Amazon warrior has lighted on Hades' land officially, leaping the last meters from their lead transport. Aberrantly, at this depth in the planet, the ground here is a rich loam, though this has not helped the scant trees——yews, quite dead——dotting the shallow, bluish hills. The particularly large trunk that would have caused a wreck, now behind them, is something of a marker for this "orchard".
It seems the crying cannot feasibly be any nearer, echoing between the decomposed wood, but still, no source betrays itself. Diana preemptively motions for silence from the others, and not a moment before Von Gunther makes her rival's jump, moving to reestablish dominance over their course. The heroine cares not; she looks back to Barbara and Epimetheus, eyes wide at the beacon which the skiffs are making for. The Red Panzer takes a hint.
"Mach diese Lichter aus," his order seeps harshly from his lips.
With haste, the headlamps down the string of transports clunk off, prompting winces from all except the resident Titan. The crying is unwavering, which could somehow be taken as a relief.
Diana's eyes make a cursory sweep of the land, then another. She detects a scattering of the dried-out saplings defined by cloven trunks at their bases, and every one of them, bearing a mere two branches. Furthermore, when one of these putative trees spasms, and clambers deeper into the gnarled grove, Diana's heart skips. A terrible fixation returns to her psyche: An old tale, from days when her mother would put her to bed, and when it was fact that the evening was the only time in which there could exist monsters.
"Hera," Diana blasphemes, in shock. "Not… Maenads."
"You see them…" Von Gunther flinches, experiencing a sighting for herself. Her spear is tucked in at her hip. Some crew members point out and gasp at another receding, gangling blur.
From the bow, Cyber chokes "What are they," with precious little spirit left, ready to collapse all over again.
"The muses of Dionysus," Barbara murmurs, with Diana picking up the rest.
"Mad, from indulgences in life. In death, in the Fields of Mourning, they will have lost more than their sanity. Here, they are not flesh, or souls. Impressions. Of annihilation."
…
"We go no further with these carriers. They will see that we are invaders."
Von Gunther is taken aback at this conclusion. "You think we will leave behind our best fortifications t—"
"Your fortifications are nothing here," Diana's voice roils. "I have told you time and again, we did not come here as we should have. We earned no shield from the shades of death. I assure you, they can harm us. And the maenads… they wish to."
The skiffs touch down, allowing to disembark: Cyber, limping to the lead; Barbara, who trips the last step off the telescopic gangway, with Panzer ever her escort; and Epimetheus, who has two dozen soldiers overtly keeping him between themselves and the heart of the dead forest. Their parade approaching, Diana finds it all too easy to picture eyes going grey, skin paling and sinking into bone. All of them, wandering to their ends. Unless.
"If I walk, they will think me one more lost soul…"
"You're not going alone," Epimetheus and Von Gunther shoot her down, as one. This offends them both.
"With each person allowed in its presence, you feed them to the apple's suggestions. We would destroy ourselves before we remembered what we were fighting over. I swear, I will bring you back the apple."
Diana knows appealing to her friends will gain her no ground with the baroness. "… Let your men stay."
"We will take whomsoever we wish. Panzer!"
Her lieutenant calls for half the men to secure their landing, and the other, to form a wide semicircle behind Diana's guidance. Panzer takes this time as they form up to boast at the princess, Barbara in hand.
"You will feel better, keeping an eye on her yourself, I think. … Safer, this way, yes? Doctor?" he corroborates with his shield. Barbara's eyes tell Diana everything on the woman's mind: The terror, the anger, and the uncanny readiness binding them.
Diana catches Cyber still walking, apart from any of her purported allies. She balks the masked woman with a hand into her shoulder; be it defensively or trustingly, Cyber mirrors the action. They again pause like this. Diana looks at the clenched fist on her, at the infinitesimal smile of courage Epimetheus has, and all the hateful and fearful men around them.
“… We must not let them realize we are of the living. … Do not answer them. Do not be afraid.”
Onwards into the ambiguous den, the band trickles. Panzer's formation disintegrates in seconds. No step taken is remiss. Every tree is intensely studied, though this care is soon made unnecessary: Diana stalks the maenads' coarser vocalizations in as straight a path possible, and instead of the ambush on everyone's minds, their first proper encounter with Hades' inhabitants is a gradual and horrible exhibition.
They are sallow. Their only coverage is mange-riddled hair and tattered pelts, rusty in color, hooked around their gaunt silhouettes. Some, in small rabbles——and others lost all to themselves——simulate a raucous soirée by throwing their bodies to phantom tones, only to come to standstills, perhaps trying to remember. Some tussle and strangle one another in the loose soil. In the spindly branches, still more of them laze and stretch. They all cry, unbearably.
Diana and her shaky company play through, and largely, the maenads ignore them in their hectic fashion. In the way of their weapons and attentions, the men selected by Von Gunther represent commendable restraint, but not to perfection: Aimlessly, one maenad scuttles from out the dry brush and into the shin of a soldier just to Diana's right, and the Amazon stays his sidearm before it can be pointed.
The maenad blenches and unduly staggers back and forth from the collision, but the amber eyes behind its tangled mane lock onto the soldier, Diana, and Cyber beside her, one at a time. It asks them each,
“Have you drink?”
It asks, with the glistening white smile of every maenad, tortured into their lips for centuries. Diana moves forward with the other two, like they are children, who would otherwise have kept gawking. Epimetheus and his cousin are the only ones to comprehend the maenad's words, spoken in too archaic a form of Greek for Barbara. Out of habit, the professor might have asked for Epimetheus to translate, but she has in mind Diana's last words; instead of comprehending, Barbara does what she can to not be afraid.
Panzer has been rapt ever since the denizens of the orchard appeared. Stably he treads, hardly containing his intoxication by the suspense. The maenads' pleas to the unknowing men come and go as a tide, when the next huddle of ragged semblances catches on to their "sisters'" newest fascination. Darting past and between legs, then skulking, slinking in their dolor, they ask.
"Have you drink?"
They cry.
"Have you drink?"
Busied with enforcing abstinence from any upheavals, Diana is caught unaware by the nauseous hike taking them almost to the fourth river, the Lethe, whose waters are as calm as silk being pulled. The trees here open into something of a small, dried-up atoll, maenads sprinkled about its rim… and down the deceiving grade: A nest of detritus, five feet high and across, cradling what they all sought.
Diana had not given thought to how the apple might appear; accurate to Eris' forecast, it is deteriorating. Of regular proportions, it bares abnormal dappling from what could——in a less abnormal place——be called oxidation. This tinges its gold with unappealing umber, but set within the suffocating blue tint of the maenads' place of unrest, it emanates a color still so lurid as to effectively sting the eyes. On its skin, the treacherous scrawl survives: "to the most fair"
It has dawned on Barbara that like most every abominable attraction in Hades, the Golden Apple has a voice all its own. But this voice is pitiable, in need. Yes, like a lost child. Telling the woman that only she would do for its protector.
"We have to… get it back to England. We need it studied, in my… I need it."
Diana knows better than to contradict her, now. If Barbara is still making excuses to have it, then she has not succumbed to it. The princess can hear it; Von Gunther and Cyber will have too, by now, as Eris of Discourse so invidiously contrived. A timer is running, more certainly than ever. Even so, Diana impedes Epimetheus from stepping right over the ledge to the fell treasure.
From the cusp of the cavity, the women and men evaluate an extraction. The maenads' patrolling is ubiquitous, but without intent. They flail about the articulated corners of the mound on which the apple is perched, which owes its composition to entwined bodies: Hands invading ribcages, jaws around throats, all mashed into a pedestal under their own power, or whatever power they had in their afterlife. These were truly the maenads, their souls. Epimetheus' inquisitive face darkens.
"Zeus must have thought the apple would offer them rest, and so vindicate Eris' wiles," Diana relates. She turns for a moment from the graphic jigsaw. "… Even their spirits perished."
She feels Cyber tugging away from her. Diana actually unhands the woman, but walks backward with her to negotiate.
"There is no need for us all to risk a trap. Take everyone back to the ships. You have my word that I will give to you the apple."
Cyber doggedly refuses. "Out of my way."
In the blink of an eye that Diana idles to tell Epimetheus not to leave Barbara's side, Panzer has offloaded Barbara onto his nearest man, breezed around the heroine, and rammed his robotic arm into Cyber's hip. There is a strum of energy felt in all their chests, and with it, Cyber pitches forward, to be stabilized by her saboteur. Patches of her sentient armor drip away.
Diana's vengeance is alone deferred by the guns that have Barbara covered. Von Gunther notes, with an incredulous eye, the Amazon's hampered response. "Spare us. Cyber would never shame your end with remorse."
"She isn't breathing as she should," Epimetheus says, redundantly, but genuinely.
"Low-bred," the baroness derogates Cyber with, passing her up. "Presumptuous. As if you were here for any reason but your weapons and your rage."
The doomed villainess has no vision. She cannot appreciate her ears' long-awaited freedom from the maenads' crying, for the enduring organic portions of her now being smothered in their cast prison. She can wriggle, like larvae, and that is all. The wispy, green light in Panzer's forearm winks out.
"Centralized, conductivity-neutralizing radiation. We call it the 'Anti-Elektrisch'," he triumphs, lowly, at her collar.
He eases Diana's lasso off his former accomplice's belt, and once delivering a pithy "Auf wiedersehen," with his enhanced strength he hauls her from the armpit, sending the paralyzed Cyber in a furious arc to the Lethe's passive body: A game, to him, although the splash has the utility of distracting a few maenads from the circle. Their overthrow assured, Von Gunther and her enforcer begin the final stretch to their ultimate desire, with Panzer theoretically awarding the apple.
Barbara, whether from the apple carving away her discretion, or from her legitimate revulsion, is having none of it.
“Illiterates,” she mocks their backs. “Neither one of you has asked yourself if Troy was always the outcome in mind. If you take that apple back to the world—”
For Barbara still to not be entertaining “the fairest”, even for herself, Diana is sure the professor has retained her wits. There is a hope to buy time with them. Her eyes swivel onto Panzer, to the Lethe, to Panzer again.
The indent in the earth carries Von Gunther's voice well, as she does not raise it or turn for the Englishwoman's nettling. “It is very simple equation, why the apple led to devastation all that time ago, little girl. It was crafted too early for me to accept it.”
"Barmy…" Barbara's diagnosis dies on the vine.
Von Gunther is five strides from the apple's altar. “I will have favor with the gods. A seat at the council that can sculpt this planet’s population with a mere thought. The divine adoration of those reprieved, and worthy to behold me. In a fair world.”
"Kill me, before I have to see it."
"Hmm… 'after.' In higher society," Von Gunther schools Barbara, "there will be demand for laborers. And bloodsport."
Panzer's unseating of the Golden Apple is perfunctory, immature. Once possessed, though, he shudders with servile gravity at it. For him, his helmet's likeness is lost in the trinket's dim reflection. It is the baroness he sees, premier, surpassing all else.
"Through the will of Odin, meine Herrscherin, I give to you—"
"Minerva is wrong," Diana rebuts: First, projecting down to the villains, then carefully taking the incline to the apple herself. The soldiers' resolve to keep Diana and her friends in line survives as little more than show. Weapons are on standby, but none of Von Gunther's men feel they have an enemy in the Amazon, not with the peripheral song and dance of the maenads, and the face of Hades' house leaning in.
"There is one who may accept the apple, who will not bring about disaster. I was shown what will follow, should you claim it, Baroness. Yours will be an ephemeral reign."
"You were shown," mimics Von Gunther, not at all listening. The apple whimpers. It needs her.
"Eris forewarned you would beat us to it," Diana declares, moderating her persistence so as not to be transparent, "and so you have. I tell you now, in your faction's subjugation of the Earth, you do not live to lord over it. The apple trades hands over and over, sowing the desolation of all you love and hate, indiscriminately."
Diana leaves them space——only a second or two——to deliberate, before she imposes completely on their ritual.
"If you cannot believe my words," she indicates her plundered lasso on Panzer's person, "see my mind. The truth."
"I've no use for your gods' omens," Von Gunther shelters herself. With the curl of the baroness' mouth, one pulse in her temple, Diana knows she has struck it. The lurking insecurity.
"But," comes the rationalization, "to glimpse our finest hours, and how I might thwart this, untimely end… I accept."
The woman sanctions Panzer to move in on Diana, who turns her back to signal concordance, with her arms behind, to be bound. Panzer privately smiles behind his mask of Death, insignificantly swapping the apple to his left hand to utilize the lasso with his stronger, favored right. Diana's thoughts are not of the surface degradation. They are entirely of Barbara and Epimetheus, both of whom watch their ally doubtingly, blind to the princess' ends, to her fear for them should she fail.
Timed with Panzer taking her arm, and not before, Diana gives what she suspects to be her penultimate words to her cousin, and to the daring woman she has only begun to know. They are the same words she last gave them: Not comforting, as before, but commanding.
"Do not be afraid."
The lasso slips around her hands. As it has forever operated, not with magic and not with guile can any one or thing in its bind cheat their nature; their truth is revealed for all to see. Diana's truth is that she has seen no explicit, future catastrophe to share with Von Gunther. The truth is that she is very much afraid herself.
The truth is, Diana is alive.
The foxes' crying stops.
Everyone stops.
It all unfolds in a flash. At her back, Diana ripples the lasso with just her wrists; her proficiency manipulates the middle of the rope to funnel as with a mind of its own into a slipknot around the apple in Panzer's left, human hand. As downplayed as her first movement, she flicks a shoulder forward. The apple slingshots from a stupefied Panzer's fingers, by her ear and, without arcing, into Epimetheus' chest. The item bounces disappointingly onto the compost of Hades' playing field, back over the lip of the crater. Epimetheus flops down in a panic, and axes his arm over the apple to pin it before it can again find Panzer.
The Titan laughs, once, at his debatable foresight, but remembering himself, he and Barbara as well catch on to what Diana means to happen.
One maenad hanging off its claimed tree bristles with new ardor, having arrived at a conclusion about this positively glowing figure sharing its home.
"Driiink"
The champion of the Amazons performs an athletic spring and backbend over Panzer, unworried that she remains leashed to him as she lands and thunders up the ridge: Not to regroup, but further on still than the rest of their party, off to the Lethe. She wails like a great wind to her friends. "BACK TO THE SHIPS!"
Then the eruption.
Every maenad catapults ravenously after their departing sustenance, whooping and salivating as they go. Barbara narrowly avoids being bowled over by two of them in the pandemonium of Von Gunther's men likewise hopping about in the stampede. It is only for Diana's distraction, masking the scent of fear that hangs sickly-sweet over them, that they all survive. Von Gunther and Panzer are beet-red, agape, torn between the apple's retrieval, punishment for Diana, and the thirsting horde streaming down the dish they find themselves served in.
A maenad, clever enough to head Diana off from its fortuitous starting position, flings from the crest above Diana to behead her with one stroke by its cursed claws. Cutting it so close that she sees the tears dried in dirty striping on the predator's taut face, Diana limbos and pummels it in the gut. It spirals over her, spraying soil when it impacts the downhill. It never stops. Disoriented, livid, it keeps on its careless warpath. To Panzer.
Nigh-exceeding his rein on Diana, he grudgingly gives her up to convert the arm into a cannon and opens fire, ranging on the maenad unwisely late. It bucks its head into his hipbone, and pairing with the series of blasts he releases under their feet, they are carried——like a skipping-stone over a lake——back up the pitch he had traversed to be here. With jets of earth in tow they violently carousel by Epimetheus, chipping the ridge which he has not yet vacated. Barbara is pulling on his baldric to encourage his legs to take him someplace else. She strives not to fixate on the gold peeking through the bend of his arm.
"Come on!"
"TAKE MY APPLE," Von Gunther retches with unbridled malice at her pawns, eyes aflame, "FROM HIS DEAD HANDS!"
But none in Hades now answer her. The flame in her eyes is snuffed by the oncoming charge. Erroneously, she takes up her polearm and wartime handgun, and twenty maenads immediately peel off for the easier meal.
Summiting the pit, lasso at long last held, Diana catches sight. She swings her wrapped arm up. "No Paula! They see only me! DON'—"
Von Gunther is swarmed by the maenads, their throng tightening like a noose. The spear of the valkyries is bitten in half, through her knuckles. They wrangle her neck; hips and shoulders are dislocated by the beggars' cluster. Then, the last maenad to join in forces an entire arm into their warm cask.
The baroness is thrown down in a fountain of viscera. Slice after psychotic slice rends muscles into grisly confetti, raining over the centuries-parched serfs of Dionysus. When the meat is picked over, they inhale the soaked earth itself, and clean the spatter off each other, not sated but refreshed; aroused, even. In all of four seconds, the baptismal episode crescendos, and stops with the efficiency of clockwork. There is more drink, and no longer could it ever be concealed from the maenads' ignited perceptions. Their pinprick eyes peruse the options above. Glistening white smiles have turned a runny red. It could be said that the maenads were alive again. Alive, and raving mad.
Diana has not lingered, knowing that observance or guilt over the drawback is pointless now. The pack which had never faltered in its pursuit matches her own dead sprint for the Lethe. Barbara and Epimetheus take inspiration, in the opposite direction, ahead of most but not all of the soldiers.
Barbara does not censure Diana's detour, though compelled. Every molecule of air in the woman's body and the others' is issued to the run, and only the run. When the maenads' blaring gekkering fires up their spines and rattles in their jaws, this purges any fledgling stratagems that the individuals of the rout have naively shaping in their minds. Their flight turns primitive in nature, brought back to cave dwellers fleeing disembodied teeth in the night.
Frantically scanning for their skiffs, Barbara is instead treated to, on either side, a flurry of ashen limbs blending with those of the trees. To no one's surprise, the maenads are gaining. Barbara's heels tear up the ground. The irregular drumming extending all through her body makes each footfall seem inferior to the one before, like the one that won't be enough. Just then, Epimetheus——not lagging in the slightest, arms working like train pistons——obscures the demonic tide for her.
"They'll get me first," he decides for the two of them. He does not look at her. He scarcely has a smile contained, and she scarcely understands.
To their left, a soldier fissures under the weight of one maenad dropping out of its arboreal hideaway. Barbara somehow makes her legs pump faster, while the creatures' rote carnage occupies Epimetheus to such a degree that his companion has to alert him of an obstacle.
"Tree!"
Barbara has a shock when the giant of a man counterintuitively rounds it nearer to an inbound maenad. Taking the professor's word a much different way than intended, Epimetheus rocks too far forward on his step past the tree which is only just taller than him, but hooks his free hand upwards on its trunk to equalize. For the Titan, the husk uproots as cleanly as a pen from a well. He brings it overhead, almost in the maenad's arms, and swats the monster into the spongy soil, underneath his jump. The extempore weapon is rendered smithereens; Epimetheus, while keeping pace, brushes away the shavings, the Golden Apple acting as his broom.
"… Worked," is all the breath Barbara can spare for his feat.
"Yes," he chirps.
~~
Diana takes her last possible moment to circumvent a tackle. She twists out of the way to let a maenad scream by, and as it swings around, she kicks its chin upside-down. It is downed for three seconds, shaking crazily before taking off into the riot again.
Three minutes, Cyber has been under.
Another twenty seconds to get her out, if she has not drifted. Four minutes, at a stretch, to have her on a transport.
For resuscitation, no math could be done.
Diana needs the maenads to catch up a little more.
~~
Barbara almost misses the next soldier taken in the rush, for how quickly it is over. A maenad boosts him by the seat of his pants, striking him twice mid-air, and he lands in two wrenched halves. Only one other hunter stops to fight for the scraps; the rest rather like their odds of a body all to themselves.
Another soldier thinks he can get off a shot, but he snags a strap on his bandolier. His boot doesn't clear the other. His consequent seconds are filled with his squeals for help, with a maenad backing him into a snapped-off trunk. It impales him over it, but slowly, as an infant would be laid in a crib. Barbara zooms by it. What she had sworn to Diana was no empty motto. Not one tear.
~~
Through Diana's parries, her group of maenads has been evened, and now they race neck-and-neck for the first taste.
Eight paces from the Lethe, her blood on fire, Diana brings her arms out from her sides.
~~
The men who were left minding the airships have reactivated their floodlights, to witness the encroaching nightmare. Their comrades and the maenads are equally blinded, but no one stalls. The men on the ground yell for assistance, with Barbara even joining them, and then the first shot punches the dirt between them and the skiffs. And another. It is unclear if they were poor attempts on the frightful, bloodied shapes further back, or if it mattered at all to those who fired. The men on the ground yell louder. A few unadvisable shots are returned to the skiff's grille, and with them, a new line is drawn.
Epimetheus points at the ships. They are rotating left, as one.
"Oh no they do not," Barbara snarls.
~~
Diana hurls herself headfirst at the Lethe's textureless surface, and whets one silver bracer off the other. Reverberating mightily enough for a steeple, a fan of sparks wraps around the focused typhoon the Amazon has produced, and the Lethe, almost voluntarily, parts twenty meters in either direction. Diana falls, and the maenads flow in, a second behind her.
Cynthia Cyber's mutilated body——caked in silt, at the very bottom of the temporary passageway——rocks minimally away from the gale of Diana's making, too heavy to be pried up by the awesome force. But not by Diana herself.
The riverbed is so soft that, in a squat, Diana is embedded all the way to her shoulders, on which she has counted. This situates her to scoop Cyber up on her neck. With next to nothing solid beneath her to work against, Diana achieves a push-off that could compact diamonds, which is only just enough to send the two in a reversed vault, surfing over and against the downpour of maenads.
Vile breath and claws tag the heroine's back, and she, with her dead weight cargo, is slowed. Diana screams, hefting Cyber out of reach. She defies the cuts, the very air obstructing her, to rise. The Lethe is returning to engulf them all.
The fifth river is not destined to be crossed this day, yet in the Acheron's darkest trench, the knell of Diana's resilience is heard. Someone there slumbering, dreaming ever-new miseries for the world high above, slumbers no more.
~~
Dodging under the hail of laser-fire, Barbara cannot believe she and Epimetheus seem to maintain their distance from the retreating convoy, before becoming aware of a separate feud aboard: The command ship that Barbara and the other abductees had come here in is presently bringing up the rear of its autopilot's own heading, as all four transports retrace their exact slide into the Underworld. The deserters had all piled into the command ship, in error, as close to the danger as they could be, and now, all those not unloading their guns' dark energy on the ground are grappling over the console. Half of them try to disengage the predetermined route to foolishly find their own, faster way out of this living hell. The rest are having second thoughts and wanting to delay for their stragglers down below, and for once, Barbara has a reason to wish some of them their lives a while longer.
The unlikely pair is practically out of the orchard, running a half-minute behind their only chance for deliverance, when Barbara and Epimetheus' paths are forced to diverge. A tree before them explodes from a blast at their backs, credited to a maenad sideswiping one fatigued soldier's Cyber-cannon. Barbara's heart sinks when one, then two of the creatures fully outdistance her. She nearly stops altogether, to accept what must follow, but none of the feral specters double back. They spring to dig their fingers into the steel of the command ship's underside, and begin to creep up and around, ducking away from the men at the rails, biding their time to let the greatest feast of all commence.
It is worse, Barbara realizes, to see them like this——processing, patient——than at their most manic. She and the current survivors on foot are being saved for later. This in mind, and their lead on the maenads lost forever, they decide it will be now, or never, that they push back.
The handful of ground troops pepper the maenads' numbers with their firearms, and the mystic weapons prove effective, to a point; the pallid beasts drop off like insects, crisped and smoldering as an occult virus grips their bony forms, though they right themselves in a matter of seconds after hitting dirt. At the back of the chase, and a problem once again, they are but a fraction slower than earlier.
Pressured into defense, some maenads still hanging on give up the skiff, and an unexpectedly coordinated maneuver of their own rains down to thresh four soldiers instantly. Barbara is spritzed by the blender of crimson, whipping her head away to see Epimetheus with one of their otherworldly enemies in a chokehold, and two wrists in one hand, to hinder it from taking his face off.
With its victorious howl, the first maenad to swing itself onto the deck clears the two parties waring over the master control panel, leaving the ships at a less-than-ideal but workable speed to overtake, and board. There will not be another chance to make it, before their train passes the Cocytus, and transcends Hades for all time. Thus, what once was "full-tilt" for Barbara is brutally redefined, where her bones may as well be blades within her muscles. She hastens all the way ahead of the besieged command ship, and when she can no longer, she launches herself onto one of the gravitational pontoons of the transport third-in-line.
The Englishwoman looks up, into the barrel of a gun. Another soldier has had the same idea to abandon the rear skiff, and is not liable to share his sanctuary. He spits some obscenity to her, where she can do nothing except cling like a rat. He goes to take his shot; he takes another, straight through his eye, from one of the last men still up and running. Barbara screams shortly, in perplexed relief. Her savior is young just like the Panzer was, charging with a limp, and for his terror, his actions cannot be read into. Had he killed his brother-in-arms with the conscience to save another, or only for his own prospects, the indeterminate gesture will remain so in Barbara's mind, to her dying day, when a maenad blitzes him to bits. Barbara gets climbing.
She gropes up the rungs running around the hull to the transom, so far as to have an arm over the topmost bar at the time that the maenad, slithering around the command ship's bow above her, sniffs her out. The thing shuffles about on the outside of the vehicle, nose down, and tenses its haunches to take Barbara: Mortal woman, facing the undeath of its amber eyes, is petrified as only she can be. Right as it is clutching its way between the skiffs, with claws aloft, a booming voice sounds out:
"Dr. Minerva!"
Epimetheus lopes desperately for the impending scene. With all his might he casts his maenad into the aft command ship, curling it around the fuselage as if it were a damp towel. Underfoot, he fetches a far-flung spike from a shattered tree, which still burns at one end with Cyber's arcane fire.
"Tree!" he recommends.
His toss spins up to Barbara. Her only opportunity being to capture it underhand, the professor takes her end of the torch back into herself, and by a hair's width she fends off the embrace of her abhorrent hunter. Like oil, the maenad's chest sizzles against Barbara's deterrent, and before it plummets from the gunwale in a fetal bundle it shreds the sleeve off of her secured arm. First, skeptical of even taking in air, the woman shivers along with her prevailing light, but then between the torch's flickering, she sees. She sees, and her own fire is rejuvenated.
She observes in wonderment: Diana of Themyscira, Cynthia Cyber over her back, pounding closer, faster than Barbara could ever dream. Epimetheus gives a cheer——prematurely, he fears——as his cousin accelerates to the maenads both hounding him and walling her off, but the pack has not the time to formulate a takedown of this new quarry presenting itself. Pulling up next to them, Diana contorts over her shoulder at one's lunge to bat it off her and into a backspin; the Amazon whirls back to her feet without missing her stride.
Mesmerized, Barbara is not braced for an increase in altitude, almost biting her tongue in the shift. She catches herself on the railing and recalls their journey here: When they had made this descent before. Layered under the gunfire and mayhem of the command ship, the dread melody of the Cocytus again infects her ears.
"Diana! Epimetheus, the river!"
The third ship is already passing over the crevice, spurring Diana on to swoop under Epimetheus' arm and hurry him along; he untucks the apple in his care, to her elation. Her yell galvanizes them both.
"Do not let go of me!"
The princess draws the disabled arm of Cyber over her front like a javelin and points around at the final two maenads scraping at their heels. Fingertips latched under the manual triggers for the inventor's wrist-mounted missiles, Diana skips the three of them a foot off the ground, then ejects the full arsenal.
They ride a radiant shockwave far over the Cocytus' murky, wanting hands, and without need of her lasso to surmount the distance, Diana and company conserve momentum in such excess that their armored legs bust through a low wall on the stern, face-planting them to general safety. Barbara takes and then comes out of unpunctual cover, amazed but unsure if this is a time to celebrate. As fast as Barbara can scurry to look them over, Diana is upright and whisking Cyber to the skiff's wheelhouse. She lays the comatose woman down, setting to digging a hand through the control console's housing, easily as with paper. Barbara watches while offering Epimetheus an unneeded hand, which he takes anyway; it is for their escape he is stifling a giggle.
"What are you doing?" Barbara pants to Diana.
"Pardon me," says Epimetheus.
Diana's lasso soars from her hand again and cinches, strung onward to the skiff which is second from the lead.
"Her organs are machine," she worries over the body. "Siphoning this ship's power into her, I might make her to breathe again. I have seen her heal similarly. … But you must both take the next ship, before I try. She may need this one, all."
Barbara's aggravation is not duly expressed in an off-color remark before Epimetheus keeps her moving for their glowing lifeline. When they stop a moment to estimate the dismaying gap they have still to brave, and as Diana prepares the cables, the list of the transport diverts all their eyes to a figure far below, which skims beyond the Cocytus, though she is not slowing at the barrier. Even over the expanse, they can discern her as feminine.
Knotted joints end with large hands folded like bats' wings, and a dusty aura of dead skin hangs as a foul halo. The matted hair spun thoroughly around an elongated skull spares them her face. After everything, the heroes nonetheless stare, unbelieving, at a view nothing short of a curse in and of itself. Her hands uncouple from the cocoon and reach. Diana now also sees that she has used the river and penned two maenads in a frenzy, as well as one last soldier, chased so fair afield that he lost his chance at the ships long ago.
This exile of Hades, awoken from the Acheron, consumes them without hesitation. Her dress' chthonic train kisses their heads, and from the inside out spreads a mist clouding their eyes, to drag them into dreary acedia. They fold and fall, colorless even by the maenads' measure: Refuse, never to think or to move again.
"Relative of yours," Barbara shakily associates for Epimetheus, shimmying the lasso without being told. The Titan takes her lead.
"I've never had the displeasure."
"We know her only too well," Diana scowls. "She is sorrow, as old as Chaos itself. Perhaps older."
Weaving, robes cracking like whips, the devil Achlys takes flight after the ships extricating the souls she so covets. How she does cry. She humbles the maenads on the command vessel, coercing them to cringe and spit at her sight. Their flock endeavors to leave their depleted cornucopia, in exchange for the third skiff, but Diana——once convinced that her friends are at the point of no return to take the second——jams her cables against a discreet terminal in the ribbing of what armor Cyber has left.
The body starved for air jolts, and water flushes from the mask's vents, while the ship beneath the women convulses at the vampiric conduit. As all its lights dim, Cyber is swept up again by Diana and launched to their next safe haven. The third transport gives out before the maenads make contact, sending the last of the shadowy facsimiles tumbling with the sapped hull back to their purgatory, to cry, to hunger through a hundred more eras.
Barbara spills onto the second vehicle's transom, tracking Diana's landing further ahead: A sight more sure-footed than her last. The professor's exhausted arms then lug her back to the edge to check on Epimetheus' progress. He has more than enough strength but not the coordination for the activity, twirling right and left because he fails to use his legs to the fullest. Not helping the predicament is the apple, taking up one hand. Epimetheus spies his companion, and thrusts up the artifact, still eight feet short.
"Take it, for if I fall!"
Barbara is stunned, as though shot. At his words the world for her contracts around the Golden Apple, highlighted in splendorous warmth on its own plane of existence. That devout whisper, again insisting that it belong to the woman. And why should it not?
"You're… you give it, to me?"
Epimetheus ceases his struggle up the rope, retracting the apple an inch. The future does, this once, vividly paint a warning in his mind, for mingled in Barbara's aspect is another's. Fair. Innocent as she was dangerous, not knowing what she seeks, and seeking all the same. Even Epimetheus can think twice, to look upon Pandora, reincarnate.
"I—"
Barbara's hypnosis is intruded upon, when her leg nudges something that crunches.
~~
Diana yearns to break away to her cousin, to secure both him and the apple. The rescued body at her feet detains her from that wiser course.
~~
The something is a maenad's carcass, scorched and deformed. Much of its body appears caved in with scads of dints the right size and shape for knuckles. Now Barbara wakes.
~~
Diana waits, palm gingerly placed over the copper chin of Cyber; after endless seconds lapse, she feels life. The princess snaps back to the scene on the stern and is on her way, before Barbara's holler.
"DIANA! HE'S NOT—"
"Nicht so schnell!"
The Red Panzer trucks into Diana's lower back, with her shield in his bionic grasp. His blindside crams her into the cabinets under the seating at the ship's rails, and at once, he turns from her bruised heap, zeroing in on Barbara. Claw and shield flip aside on his prosthetic to make way for the cannon within. Barbara dives. The shot reshapes the stern down to the rudder; immense heat bends the rail tethering Epimetheus out and up, dangling the large man like bait on a fishing rod. He slips one arm's length back, to the pursuing Achlys.
Barbara turns over at Panzer's weighty footsteps, and is startled to make out that in the ferocious clash with his maenad, the soldier's only human arm must have been ripped from his body: Its dearth poorly cauterized, presumably by his own weapon. She finds him just about laughable, to picture him limbless, terrified, retreating all the way back to this ship for the ill-gotten hoard he had there. For a shield, of all things.
"You coward," the woman coughs.
Wordless as the Reaper, and gentle, Panzer holds the shield down on Barbara's chest. One boot powers into her wrist. The other kicks her in the ear, hard. Epimetheus, looking on as he must, tosses and yells, close to the end of his gold thread.
Diana is back in action to shunt Panzer with a bracer, saving her cousin from the offhanded attempt the villain makes to blast the moving target. Ducking out of a headlock, Panzer repels the Amazon volleying punches for his stomach. They dance and pirouette, Diana leading, skirting the melty edge of the transom. Her attacks, all glancing off the broad shield in a fireworks display, knock the mortal man to a knee, and Diana seizes the opening. She forks a hand under her poached shield and constricts the nerveless appendage's carapace. It stays impressively intact. Panzer keeps pushing and kicks at her leg, with no leverage, and to no effect.
Epimetheus takes one hand over the other, and clings. Barbara is up on an arm, then down again, leaking black from her ear. Trying to veil her worry, Diana threatens the aspiring assassin in a voice deeper than Hades. "You may still bleed out. Yield."
Panzer slumps enough to satisfy her, to then fire the grappling cord behind his hand. The shield hammers her nose and resets their match. Panzer waits for no retaliation; he takes her hip into his shoulder——and his shield, a tray——full-force, pivoting on his inside foot to shot-put Diana through the wheelhouse and bridge. She belts him once in the top of the helmet before she goes, her body trashing circuitry and subsequently frying for a nanosecond on the bed of newly-shaped blades, which bite into her preexisting lacerations. Dazed and with no counterweight for his move, her opponent sprawls too, a wreck.
Their right, rear gravitational generator dies. At the ship being jostled by the electrical upset, Barbara chases away the dark from her vision yet again. Panzer somehow stands, the picture of a weather-beaten shack, watching Diana sway semi-conscious in the toothy floorboards: Her run, and slashes suffered, having taken their toll. Head swimming, Barbara's only functioning ear transmits Panzer's haggard phrase.
"Those… were my oldest friends you killed," it grinds like metal. He lets go the shield.
Epimetheus is still two meters from the rail.
The hatch from whence Diana's shield had been acquired, concave on its hinge, takes some more turbulence and frees the remainder of Panzer's stowed trophies. Out skitters the Amazon sword, some jewelry whose owner cannot miss it, a partial raptor's wing riding atop… and one profound oddity, staring at Barbara without eyes: The head of Dr. Andonis Bal.
Realizing what it is expends the same time it does for Barbara to realize she is not stone. Her faculties sharpen on her anger, and to a crouch she rises with the temperature; beneath, the volcanic Pyriphlegethon roars at their departure. Panzer is too consumed to feel anything outside of himself.
Through the warped visor of his helmet, one, wild eye is visible. It does not soften, but rather slides, into a supremely unfeeling laser, affixed to the fallen sword. The Red Panzer recoups his regimental posture; he gathers his bleeding pride, contemplating Diana's transgressions, and a suitable reprisal, like it is arithmetic. He nods.
"I am going to flay you," he apprises the impaired princess, and as an automaton would, he trudges for her weapon, in range of the other, quite-forgotten woman.
Barbara fumbles for the head, nabbing just one of its snakes behind its mandibles right before the monstrosity rolls off into the firestorm leaping up at the hurtling sled. She presses a thumb on the scaly brow of her acquisition, and pounces——as best she can, on the askew bed of the transport——at Panzer.
She crashes a foot short of his boots, scrambling for a breathless moment, then crudely drives the fangs she has exposed from the dead serpent’s maw down his thigh and calf. Panzer shrieks.
Though its Gorgonian gaze is bygone, the venom of the head's many mouths has been lying in wait, no less potent than when produced. The vicious man's blood curdles in the leg, stopping him in his tracks. In this unthinkable heartbeat, Barbara bear hugs his waist and runs them both over the starboard railing.
His top half pops and sags back unnaturally on the bar, and he gasps, not at the severing of bone but in feeling himself fall. His claw lunges, for anything. It finds Barbara's left wrist. The Englishwoman's shoulder and ribs are towed tightly over the wall, to share his fate. As she screams, Diana and Epimetheus together, on their knees from last-ditch exertions, clasp her legs and belly from behind. More bones are splintered, now in Barbara's hand. The pincer strips her skin, but her friends guarantee: It cannot have her.
Stealing his final pound of flesh, Panzer's ruined, fragmental body spins away to the fiery seam perfectly, hauntingly aligned to take him. Sheathed in his ankle, his very own victims and their pledge shall act the part of his eternal ball and chain. Diana holds Barbara away, both of them pale, both examining the price paid. The professor's shuddering, wet hand features a nasty groove running up the palm's base between the middle and ring fingers. Her pains, manifold, do not outweigh her gratitude to be drinking even the dense, bitter air here. She lives.
Still, no reprieve can be enjoyed. A hideous screech reminds them of the unremitting scourge of Achlys, just now sharking onto their command ship, encumbering it with her splaying hands. The heroes can hear her smelling, caressing its surface, for color to blot, voices to hush. Making sure Barbara will manage keeping pressure on her arm, Diana rises to the challenge, to see that Epimetheus has outdone her by retrieving her armaments. He is studying the dark deity, fitting and refitting the sword in an agitated fist.
"I think she has enough of a hold on the world already, from down here, don't you?" he poses his cousin.
When Achlys' prowling yields nothing to corrupt, a tantrum builds in her perpetual bones, and unleashes. She takes apart the previously-overrun ship like cotton, clawing higher for the last two like it. A truly baleful noise blasts through the hair webbing her face, aimed at the Titan centered on his vessel, yet he behaves no differently than if a summer breeze had passed. His eyebrows lift.
"Let us see she does not come any closer."
He props one sandal on the slag that is left of the skiff's rear guardrail. To jump. Diana is on his arm in a wink to stop the foolhardy deed. Epimetheus acknowledges her, but only to convey:
"What I wanted to tell you, before, when we arrived… I would not recognize forgiveness if ever I found it. But with your hope, I feel I could disappoint the world a thousand times and still have it in me to fight."
"We can outrun her, before she is led back. Epimetheus, look at me. We can outrun her."
Epimetheus breathes in another of Achlys' bellows, but they are no drug to him. He does not act on impulse now. His mind is clear. "We can't."
Barbara is sensing the mood from across the deck. She sits higher, only slightly, on a leg. "No. No, we… we can collapse the entrance!"
"Yes, that will do very well too!" the big man sings his endorsement. First making use of his scabbard, he takes Diana's arm the way she has his, and allows her his vast eyes. "… But she will not be stopped with rocks. Someone to keep her busy. For a long time. Someone who can take hits…"
Epimetheus turns the shield. The Golden Apple is there in its saucer, to change hands. His Amazon kin plays the game formerly his, refusing to look.
"No one else may bestow the apple! You cannot stay behind!" Diana contends. "If someone is to do this—"
Epimetheus does not try to shrug her away, reverting to keeping an eye on Achlys' movements. "Eris was too good to put this to me. Wrong to. Don't you see? The grandest disaster will come with my consent. No. It never should have been me, choosing 'the fairest'. I choose this."
Gusts have blown his hair a rascally shape, and so oblige Epimetheus to take on a grin to go with. He tries to cheer Diana up: For once, feeling like the older of the two. "And at that: A simple demigoddess, doing a Titan's task?"
Scooting another foot before giving in, Barbara needs far more persuading. "The manuscript. What it says might be coming, if…"
The professor's qualms are in harmony with Diana's. "How can we take this chance, that Eris lies?" she restricts Epimetheus' undertaking.
His neck wavers, more than understanding her plea, to which he argues with no delight: "How can we let that go free, up there?"
Neither warrior feels they have won. The only indication of such comes with Diana's half-step back.
In confusion, Barbara mumbles "Stop him," though she intends it to be a yell.
Epimetheus hears. "Dr. Minerva, I would appreciate, before I go, a definition of that word 'barmy.'"
Off her guard, Barbara is too choked to answer.
"Some other day," he resolves, foisting levity.
Achlys has made back half the distance to them, after her setback, and the Styx, already vanishing from the three's sights, gets them keen to their speed. Destruction of their bridge sent Cyber's technological wayfinder into overdrive, now causing them to rear-end the last, individually-operable ship ahead, on the same invisible track. The wedge will capsize both, if nothing is done.
Epimetheus sets himself up for the plunge again. Not for lack of trying, Diana is not finding her words.
“This time, Lady Diana… this time I am not overlooking anything. This is plain enough for even me. I have outlived so much of my family," his chin quakes.
"… Please, give me the privilege of not seeing the end of your days also… and trust me with this. I think, what I need, is to be trusted. Surely I can’t forget or betray this duty, if it’s all I will ever know.”
The companions feel their weights, at the most dramatic escalation of the ships so far, on to the deciding segment jetting them back to Greece. Epimetheus reattempts his donation. Diana does put her hand over the apple immediately, but holds it there between them a spell.
"I will find the one fairest."
"You needn't convince me."
A new keeper is appointed to the costly creation, and the liberated Titan hunches on the precipice, only, one last order of business halts him. Epimetheus remembers something. The sword and shield are also offered, with a sorry expression: The last of its kind, from him.
"Keep them," Diana acquits, without regret.
Steps can be seen, like——what felt——so long ago, whizzing underneath in a glinting pattern to catch Epimetheus.
"Bury us," he suggests, soft as a feather.
"Stop… him."
From the transom, Epimetheus alights. Professionally, without looking down to memorialize the exploit for herself, Diana retakes her lasso from the overhanging rail, and leaves the rest behind.
"Why. Didn't," Barbara recoils at her approach.
Diana hops her up while also collecting Cyber, then sails them all over the drawbridge being made by the two skiffs, before it becomes too trying a peak. Laid down with care, Barbara unappreciatively thrashes over, doing her hand no good, to watch a rapidly-shrinking Epimetheus impact the steps. A stolid cypress of a man, his legs take and cancel his velocity, and right away he has to swing up and stab at the living shroud rippling toward him.
Achlys is on and around him like a parasite, for one crushing second. Heavenly shafts blaze through her great, desirous hands, unwrapping her to reveal her antithesis. Epimetheus has her solidly nailed in her missing heart. His blade is miraculously the light source, pouring the warmth of a star into his screaming sorrow. Here, the deadlock for many lifetimes begins. If on the steps herself, Barbara could have seen there is a sign of strain in his back, a pull to the skin around his eyes; ultimately, however, that Epimetheus is, to the credit of Diana's gifts alone, far indeed from being outmatched.
The cave's mouth dead ahead, Diana bumps their throttle with an elbow, simultaneously and with impeccable control roping the rear ship, in a graceful curve through the port railing. One yank on this fulcrum displaces the obsolete craft, sending it groaning off to the side. There is a brief, stupendous period of it serenely verging on stone somewhere in the tunnel's void. Contact is made with tectonic force, splitting walls and threatening the same to the escapees' heads. The splashed fuel of Cyber's sorcerous design climbs through strata fast as wildfire, destabilizing sediment from time immemorial, and Barbara Minerva catches a farewell flare from the last, and unfailing life in the Underworld. Then the curtain of earth draws.
The skiff breaks free into a nighttime, natural and brisk, that is to be rejoiced by the women. They are swerved around, given seats to the spectacular sight of a swath of the hillside deflating, exhaling from the opening. It all fills itself in with brush and boulders, to be both an astounding and unassuming landscape again. The land of Dirou falls back asleep.
No rejoicing comes. Tonight, the beauty and silence breeds only melancholy in one soul, and resentment in another. Barbara turns her head to her: The champion. What had Cyber said?
"Righteous colors."
The attack comes to Diana more pitiless than any other that day. Barbara looks at her like one looks at disease.
"It's that easy, is it?" is the next knife through her. It is unbelievable to Barbara the way she remains standing there, appearing to do nothing besides fiddle with the lasso.
"Are you going to say. ANYthing?!"
Barbara rushes her to flip her around by the left shoulder. Its arm is bandaged in the lasso as when the baroness was tricked. The other hand closes the resistant professor's on a loose end of the bind, to commune. It is not Diana's voice, precisely. Barbara does not hear sentences. She feels everything Diana feels in each second, and knows what the princess knows to be true.
~Barbara, I pled for the mistress of the river Styx to accord us victory. Exchanged for her blessings and mastery over her land, I swore these gifts would be enough for me to deliver you, and my cousin, from that place. I have not made good.~
Barbara shakes herself, and blinks.
~For this, Styx decrees that I shall walk for a time without the capacity to go back on my word. I am mute.~
"You're going to tell me what you lost?" the whole of Barbara trembles.
~I saw no other way. Had she obtained the apple, Von Gunther might have killed you in the next breath. I never meant for the maenads—~
"You think this is about you going back for THAT?" Barbara flails at the body of Cynthia littering the deck and breathing huskily. "Or my hand? I want to know how you cou—"
~He made the choice himself.~
"He would have done anything for you! He would have stayed for you! You LET him do that!" Barbara accuses, tearing away in a cold sweat. She knows Diana knows this. "He doesn't deserve to be left there!"
She knows Diana knows.
"It's not…"
The word to complete the thought enrages her more. She circles nothing in particular, batting away moisture. "We could've led that thing back in, if it came to that! W-we would've worked something out. The apple…"
…
"He was going to give it to me," she says dejectedly. "It could have been me. You weren't fast enough. You stopped him. You didn't stop him."
Diana is watching a woman being torn apart. The delusion is partially the apple's, whispering away behind her own back. The other components, Diana finds hard to pass off on a tangible evil.
Barbara digs and begs and pretends a smile. "Let me have it. I can, study it. It, it doesn't have to be mine! We'll get it right. And besides I've earned it."
She gulps. Her statuesque counterpart is unstirred, sadly winding the lariat up higher on her arm. Diana will not make her enter the rapport again, for she had soon realized in their first that she had minimal sovereignty over her utmost sentiments, and did not know exactly what the woman heard from her mind. The terror, of transparency, is now hers like no other's, and years hence it will be.
"… I have nothing."
Nothing, no one, and no sway, and the reason for it, Barbara supposes, is that the Amazon's mind was made prior to her outpouring of sensibilities, her sound logic. Diana knows whose apple it is.
Barbara relaxes. Her mouth creases. Diana takes no actions to recover her, as she spends a minute fishing one-handed through their ship's compartments, at last coming up with a kit of gauze and ointment, which was the only left thing to keep her from setting off. Wrapping her hand on her way, her boots plunk into sand, headed north. She can tell the heroine watches, with concern. It makes her see red.
"Go, take it. I know where I am."
Diana questions if she does. A new grasp on empathy, spoiled by blame and losses unmerited: It was developing into a scar which Diana knows nothing of how to mend, with or without her words. She is less than proud to wish——more than she would ever want to erase all of Barbara's experiences this day——that the scar stays, and that she never find out all of who the woman becomes.
+++ DISCLAIMER +++
Nothing you see here is real, even though the model, the conversion or the presented background story might be based on historical facts. BEWARE!
Some background:
Tyne was the second of the five River-class light cruisers in the Royal Navy, which were introduced during the interwar period and played, after modifications, an active role in World War II, especially in the Mediterranean theatre of operations.
After the construction of the Danae-class cruiser, the demerits of the small cruiser concept became apparent. At the end of 1917, plans for an additional six C-class vessels, plus three new-design 7,200 ton-class scouting cruisers were shelved, in favor of an intermediate 5,500 ton-class vessel which could be used as both a long-range, high speed scout ship, and also as a command vessel for destroyer or submarine flotillas. The resulting River-class vessels were essentially enlarged versions of the Danae-class cruisers, with greater speed, range, and weaponry. With improvements in geared-turbine engine technology, the River-class vessels were capable of the high speed of 36 knots (67 km/h), and a range of 9,000 nmi (17,000 km) at 10 kn (12 mph; 19 km/h). The number of BL 6-inch (152.4 mm) L/45 Mark XII guns was increased from only three to seven in single mounts and provision was made for 48 naval mines. However, the four triple torpedo launchers on the Danae-class were reduced to just two double launchers, and the River-class remained highly deficient in anti-aircraft protection, with only two QF 3 in 20 cwt L/45 Mk. I and two QF 2-pounder L/39 Mk. II guns. A total of eight ships were ordered, but, with less pressure after the end of WWI, only five were built and finished.
The first River-class ship, H.M.S. “Trent”, was laid down in December 1918 and launched in August 1919. H.M.S. “Tyne” was the second cruiser of this new class, laid down 8 July 1919, launched 24 September 1920 and completed at Chatham Royal Dockyard 2 June 1922. Completed too late to see action in the First World War, “Tyne” was initially assigned to operate in the Baltic Sea against the Bolshevik revolutionaries in Russia. She was then on detached service in the West Indies. Following this assignment, she was attached to the 1st Light Cruiser Squadron of the Atlantic Fleet for the following five years. 1923/24, “Tyne” became a member of the Cruise of the Special Service Squadron, also known as the “Empire Cruise”. Following this tour, she went with the squadron to the Mediterranean for the next few years.
In May 1928 “Tyne” was assigned to the North America and West Indies Station, based at the Royal Naval Dockyard in Bermuda. She ran aground on 2 July 1928 on the Thrum Cap Shoal, 5 nautical miles (9.3 km) off Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and was badly damaged, suffering the breach of her engine room and of one of her boiler rooms. She was abandoned by most of her 445 crew, the officers remaining on board. Subsequently, all her guns and torpedo tubes and much of her other equipment had to be removed to lighten her. She was finally refloated on 11 July 1928 and towed off by H.M.S. “Despatch” and several tugs. She was repaired throughout 1929 and then reduced to the reserve.
In 1930, however, due to a shortage of ships at foreign theatres of operation, she was reactivated and transferred back to the America and West Indies Station. During 1931-1933 she served with the South American Division, and in 1934 she relieved the cruiser “Curlew” in the Mediterranean and was reassigned to the 3rd Cruiser Squadron. In 1935 she returned to Britain to be paid off into the reserve, but “Tyne” was kept active in British coastal waters for cadet training.
On the outbreak of the Second World War, “Tyne” was recommissioned and thoroughly modernized, since the original armament and other equipment had become obsolete by 1939. All five River-class ships were re-designed as light trade protection cruisers and were outfitted with new, state-of-the-art equipment and armament, including six new and very compact turrets. Pairs were placed at the bow and at the stern each, with another two placed singly at port and starboard amidships. Each was armed with twin 5.25-inch (133 mm) guns in high angle mountings. These new, quick-firing weapons were primarily surface weapons, but it was intended to fire the heaviest shell suitable for anti-aircraft defense, so that the ships could be used for convoy protection from aerial attacks.
The ballistic performance of the QF 5.25 was very good, with a maximum range of 24,070 yd (22,010 m) at 45 degrees with an 80 lb (36.3 kg) HE shell. In comparison, the contemporary French 138 mm (5.4 in) Mle 1934 guns as used on the Mogador-class destroyers had a maximum range of 21,872 yards (20,000 m) at 30 degrees with an 88 lb (39.9 kg) SAP shell, and the Italian 135/45 mm gun as used on the Capitani Romani-class cruisers had a maximum range of 21,435 yards (19,600 m) at 45 degrees with a 72.1 lb (32.7 kg) AP shell.
The new turrets were far more modern in design than previous light cruiser turrets and offered efficient loading up to 70 degrees to provide the intended dual-purpose capability. Furthermore, “Tyne” was, like its revamped sister ships, outfitted with four twin QF 2-pounder (40 mm) "pom-poms" and a pair of triple 21-inch (533 mm) torpedo tube launchers, mounted under the main deck. The latter carried a steam catapult for a reconnaissance waterplane, initially a Fairey Swordfish on floats but later replaced by a Supermarine Walrus amphibious flying boat. The depth charge racks were augmented by two new launchers.
After her modifications at Portsmouth Royal Dockyard, field tests in the Channel and receiving a light disruptive Admiralty paint scheme, “Tyne” joined the 2nd Cruiser Squadron, escorting convoys to Scandinavia and engaged in the hunt for the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. After the Norwegian Campaign she participated in the operations hunting the German battleship Bismarck and, together with the cruiser “Kenya”, intercepted one of the German supply ships, “Belchen”, on 3 June 1941.
Between July and August 1941, as part of Force K with the Home Fleet, she was involved in “Operation Gauntlet”, with operations to Spitzbergen and Bear Island. After one of these sorties, in company with the cruiser “Nigeria”, she intercepted a German troop convoy off Northern Norway, and the German ship “Bremse” was sunk. Later that year she was transferred to the Mediterranean and arrived in Alexandria on 21 October 1941 to join a new Force K, where the ship received a new high-contrast paint scheme, typical for this theatre of operations.
On 9 November 1941, Force K, consisting of “Tyne”,”Aurora”, “Penelope”, “Lance” and “Lively”, she was involved in the destruction of the Beta Convoy. In the resulting battle the Italian destroyer “Fulmine” was sunk, as well as the German transports “Duisburg” and “San Marco”, the Italian transports “Maria”, “Sagitta” and “Rina Corrado”, and the Italian “Conte di Misurata” and “Minatitlan”. The Italian destroyers “Grecale” and “Euro” were damaged.
On 24 November Force K, intercepted an Axis convoy about 100 nautical miles west of Crete. The Axis convoy was bound from the Aegean to Benghazi. The two German transports in the convoy, “Maritza” and “Procida”, were both sunk by H.M.S. “Penelope” and H.M.S. “Lively” despite the presence of the Italian torpedo boats “Lupo” and “Cassiopea”. On 1 December 1941 Force K, with “Tyne”, “Penelope” and ”Lively”, attacked the Mantovani Convoy. The Italian destroyer “Alvise Da Mosto” and the sole cargo ship “Mantovani” were sunk. H.M.S. “Tyne” next participated in the First Battle of Sirte on 17 December 1941. On 19 December, while steaming off Tripoli, she was heavily damaged in a mine field and was forced to retire to Malta for hull repairs.
After repairs, which lasted several months into summer 1942, she returned to service in the MTO and joined Force H. In November she became part of the Centre Task Force for the Landings in North Africa, Operation Torch. Off Oran, she engaged the Vichy French destroyers “Tramontane” and “Tornad”e on 8 November 1942, damaging the former so badly that it had to be beached. The following day she badly damaged the destroyer “Épervier” and drove it ashore. By early December 1942 she was operating as part of Force Q at Bône against the Axis evacuation and supply convoys between Trapani and Tunis.
However, “Tyne” was hit on 20 December 1942 off Trapani (Sicily) by an air-dropped torpedo. She caught fire, had two of her turrets out of action and was badly flooded. Later that day she was attacked once more by German dive-bombers, and a fatal bomb hit at the ship’s stern eventually led to her loss the following day. 115 men were killed through the attacks, the rest, more than two-thirds of the crew, was rescued.
All River-class ships had a very active war career and proved to be satisfactory in service, even though they were hardly a match for full-fledged battleships and worked best in conjunction with other ships. Especially in the Mediterranean they were very effective in protecting crucial convoys to Malta and even managed to see off some ships of the Italian Royal Navy. However, their outdated WWI machinery became their Achilles heel and limited their potential, and the relatively light main guns lacked range and firepower to take on major enemy ships their own.
From 1940 on the ships were to be replaced by the much more modern and better-equipped new Dido-class cruisers, but a shortage of guns for them, due to difficulties in manufacturing them, delayed their introduction so that the River-class cruisers had to soldier on. Two ships, “Tyne” and “Thames”, were lost, and the three post-war survivors “Trent”, “Severn” and “Mersey”, were immediately put into reserve after the end of hostilities in Europe and quickly broken up.
General characteristics:
Displacement: 5,100 long tons (5,200 t) (standard)
Length: 500 ft (152.4 m)
Beam: 47 ft (14.2 m)
Draft: 16 ft (4.8 m)
Draught: 12 ft 6 in (3.8 m) (deep)
Armor: Belt: 64 mm (3 in), Deck: 29 mm (1 in)
Complement: 450
Propulsion:
12× Admiralty boilers with 4× geared steam turbines, developing 90,000 shp (67,000 kW)
and driving four shafts
Performance:
Top speed: 36 knots (67 km/h; 41 mph)
Range: 5,000 nmi (9,300 km; 5,800 mi) at 14 kn (26 km/h; 16 mph)
Armament (after conversion):
12× 5.25 guns (133 mm) 50 caliber guns in six twin turrets
4× twin QF 2-pounder (40 mm) "pom-pom" AA guns in powered mounts
2× triple 21-inch (533 mm) torpedo tubes
2× throwers and 2× racks astern with 48 depth charges
The kit and its assembly:
The Royal Navy’s River-class light cruisers never existed. These fictional interwar ships were based on the Dido-class cruisers’ concept, just placed in an earlier generation and realized on the basis of an old/outdated ship. Inspiration came with an aftermarket set of six 1:700 white metal turrets that I came across recently, and I wanted to use it to build something like the American Atlanta-class light cruisers with a specialized AA armament.
However, this armament called for a suitable and bigger hull than my former destroyer builds, and I was eventually able to hunt down a cheap Tamiya kit of a Japanese Kuma-class light cruiser as starting point. It was perfect in size (almost exactly as big as a Dido-class cruiser!), shape and time frame, even though I I basically only used the kit’s single-piece hull as starting point. I had to modify the superstructures thoroughly to adapt the Japanese ship to the new role and also to a more Western layout and silhouette.
For instance, the typically Japanese tall “pagoda” bridge/command section of that era had to disappear, and I changed the superstructures almost completely, because the new twin turrets needed much more space than the small single guns of the Kuma cruiser. I also wanted to place them at different levels, and this called for suitable staggered platforms, too.
Initially there was the plan to mount the six turrets in groups of three at both bow and stern, but it was soon clear that this would not work – this arrangement would have been too long and too high, too, so that I went with two staggered pairs. I also wanted to give the ship – unlike the American Atlanta-class ships – a catapult for an on-board aircraft, and this required some free space on deck.
With this framework I scratched new/additional superstructures, using leftover pieces from the two recently built Matchbox K-class destroyers and from a Revell H.M.S. Ark Royal carrier. Everything evolved through trial-and error, in an attempt to find a plausible layout for all the deck equipment. The lowered hull section for the Kuma-class’ front torpedo tubes was filled with a cabin and re-purposed for lifeboats. Then the initially continuous superstructure was split to make room for the steam catapult amidships at deck level. The rear turrets eventually found their final places on a separate superstructure that would also carry the secondary mast and the crane for the floatplane, and I mounted the last two turrets in lateral positions (again somewhat inspired by the Atlanta-class arrangement with similar positions), above the Kuma-class’ openings for the rear torpedo launch tubes. These did not make sense at this position anymore, so that the OOB openings were closed/filled and moved further forward, under the new “flight deck”. Some PSR had to be done, too, in order to blend some disparate donor parts and fill the worst gaps. Therefore, the finish is certainly not as crisp as an OOB model – but I think that these flaws remained on an acceptable level.
Once the general deck layout had been settled, detail work began. This included a re-arrangement of bridge, masts and funnels, and the main deck had to offer enough space for the re-located catapult, together with the turrets in the side positions, lifeboats and AA stations, which found their place at deck level and in two twin alcoves in higher positions. Fiddly stuff, and I must admit that “creating” such a battleship is conceptually not easy.
The aircraft on board is actually the OOB Kawanishi E7K floatplane from the Kuma-class cruiser kit – but it looks similar enough to a Swordfish that this illusion could be easily supported with a suitable paint scheme.
Painting and markings:
I used the opportunity to apply another typical Royal Navy paint scheme, a so-called “Alexandria-style” pattern. This was a high-contrast scheme, sometimes described as consisting of black and white, but it was typically made up from 507a (Dark Grey) and 507c (Light Grey). It had been christened after the dockyard where it had been initially applied, and it was actually not a defined pattern (like the Admiralty schemes, which had been designed at offices by people who frequently had no practical naval experience!), but rather a common but individual application of standard paints that had been in ample supply at most dockyards! The ships had to be painted with what was at hand, and so the disruptive scheme caught on and was applied, like Mountbatten Pink, to a considerable number of British ships operating in the MTO. This two-tone scheme was not intended to conceal the ships, but rather to confuse the observer concerning speed, direction and what the ship actually was.
The pattern I applied to the model was loosely based on what the cruiser H.M.S. Devonshire carried in 1941, a kind of zebra pattern with wide, well-defined block stripes. As a visual gimmick these stripes were kind of “mirrored” along a line on the hull, as if reflected by the water and therefore making assessing size or distance even more difficult.
The paints are Humbrol 147 (Light Grey, FS 36495) and 27 (Sea Grey). The deck was painted as if the wooden areas had not been overpainted yet and allowed to weather, so that the once-holystoned, yellow-ish light wood had become dull and rather grey-ish. I used Humbrol 168 (RAF Hemp) and Revell 87 (Beige) as basis, and some light shading with thinned sepia ink was done to enhance the wooden look – and it’s nice contrast to the rather cold, grey camouflage. Metal decks, turret tops and the bow area were painted with Revell 47, simulating 507b (Medium Grey). Areas around the bridge were painted with Humbrol 62 (Leather) to simulate Corticene coating.
I originally wanted to paint the model in separate elements before final assembly, but this was not possible due to the many adjustments. The model was slightly weathered with a highly thinned black ink wash. Some Sienna Brown water paint was used for rust stains here and there. Portholes along the hull and on the superstructures were created with a thin black felt tip pen. The same tool was used to paint the muzzles of the guns. The crisp black boot topping was easy to create through the kit’s separate waterline bottom – OOB it comes in red, and it just had to be re-painted.
The kit’s segments were sealed with a coat of acrylic matt varnish before final assembly. Finally, rigging with heated and extended dark grey sprue material was done and paper flags were added.
It is not obvious, but the fictional H.M.S. “Tyne” took more scratchwork and mods than one would expect – it was/is almost a scratch build on the basis of a stock cruiser hull. More or less, the whole superstructure was re-arranged and the whole armament is new, but I think that the outcome looks quite plausible. The camouflage – even though only consisting of two shades of grey - looks interesting, too, and I think that the confusing effect becomes obvious in some of the beauty pics.
+++ DISCLAIMER +++
Nothing you see here is real, even though the model, the conversion or the presented background story might be based on historical facts. BEWARE!
Some background:
Tyne was the second of the five River-class light cruisers in the Royal Navy, which were introduced during the interwar period and played, after modifications, an active role in World War II, especially in the Mediterranean theatre of operations.
After the construction of the Danae-class cruiser, the demerits of the small cruiser concept became apparent. At the end of 1917, plans for an additional six C-class vessels, plus three new-design 7,200 ton-class scouting cruisers were shelved, in favor of an intermediate 5,500 ton-class vessel which could be used as both a long-range, high speed scout ship, and also as a command vessel for destroyer or submarine flotillas. The resulting River-class vessels were essentially enlarged versions of the Danae-class cruisers, with greater speed, range, and weaponry. With improvements in geared-turbine engine technology, the River-class vessels were capable of the high speed of 36 knots (67 km/h), and a range of 9,000 nmi (17,000 km) at 10 kn (12 mph; 19 km/h). The number of BL 6-inch (152.4 mm) L/45 Mark XII guns was increased from only three to seven in single mounts and provision was made for 48 naval mines. However, the four triple torpedo launchers on the Danae-class were reduced to just two double launchers, and the River-class remained highly deficient in anti-aircraft protection, with only two QF 3 in 20 cwt L/45 Mk. I and two QF 2-pounder L/39 Mk. II guns. A total of eight ships were ordered, but, with less pressure after the end of WWI, only five were built and finished.
The first River-class ship, H.M.S. “Trent”, was laid down in December 1918 and launched in August 1919. H.M.S. “Tyne” was the second cruiser of this new class, laid down 8 July 1919, launched 24 September 1920 and completed at Chatham Royal Dockyard 2 June 1922. Completed too late to see action in the First World War, “Tyne” was initially assigned to operate in the Baltic Sea against the Bolshevik revolutionaries in Russia. She was then on detached service in the West Indies. Following this assignment, she was attached to the 1st Light Cruiser Squadron of the Atlantic Fleet for the following five years. 1923/24, “Tyne” became a member of the Cruise of the Special Service Squadron, also known as the “Empire Cruise”. Following this tour, she went with the squadron to the Mediterranean for the next few years.
In May 1928 “Tyne” was assigned to the North America and West Indies Station, based at the Royal Naval Dockyard in Bermuda. She ran aground on 2 July 1928 on the Thrum Cap Shoal, 5 nautical miles (9.3 km) off Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and was badly damaged, suffering the breach of her engine room and of one of her boiler rooms. She was abandoned by most of her 445 crew, the officers remaining on board. Subsequently, all her guns and torpedo tubes and much of her other equipment had to be removed to lighten her. She was finally refloated on 11 July 1928 and towed off by H.M.S. “Despatch” and several tugs. She was repaired throughout 1929 and then reduced to the reserve.
In 1930, however, due to a shortage of ships at foreign theatres of operation, she was reactivated and transferred back to the America and West Indies Station. During 1931-1933 she served with the South American Division, and in 1934 she relieved the cruiser “Curlew” in the Mediterranean and was reassigned to the 3rd Cruiser Squadron. In 1935 she returned to Britain to be paid off into the reserve, but “Tyne” was kept active in British coastal waters for cadet training.
On the outbreak of the Second World War, “Tyne” was recommissioned and thoroughly modernized, since the original armament and other equipment had become obsolete by 1939. All five River-class ships were re-designed as light trade protection cruisers and were outfitted with new, state-of-the-art equipment and armament, including six new and very compact turrets. Pairs were placed at the bow and at the stern each, with another two placed singly at port and starboard amidships. Each was armed with twin 5.25-inch (133 mm) guns in high angle mountings. These new, quick-firing weapons were primarily surface weapons, but it was intended to fire the heaviest shell suitable for anti-aircraft defense, so that the ships could be used for convoy protection from aerial attacks.
The ballistic performance of the QF 5.25 was very good, with a maximum range of 24,070 yd (22,010 m) at 45 degrees with an 80 lb (36.3 kg) HE shell. In comparison, the contemporary French 138 mm (5.4 in) Mle 1934 guns as used on the Mogador-class destroyers had a maximum range of 21,872 yards (20,000 m) at 30 degrees with an 88 lb (39.9 kg) SAP shell, and the Italian 135/45 mm gun as used on the Capitani Romani-class cruisers had a maximum range of 21,435 yards (19,600 m) at 45 degrees with a 72.1 lb (32.7 kg) AP shell.
The new turrets were far more modern in design than previous light cruiser turrets and offered efficient loading up to 70 degrees to provide the intended dual-purpose capability. Furthermore, “Tyne” was, like its revamped sister ships, outfitted with four twin QF 2-pounder (40 mm) "pom-poms" and a pair of triple 21-inch (533 mm) torpedo tube launchers, mounted under the main deck. The latter carried a steam catapult for a reconnaissance waterplane, initially a Fairey Swordfish on floats but later replaced by a Supermarine Walrus amphibious flying boat. The depth charge racks were augmented by two new launchers.
After her modifications at Portsmouth Royal Dockyard, field tests in the Channel and receiving a light disruptive Admiralty paint scheme, “Tyne” joined the 2nd Cruiser Squadron, escorting convoys to Scandinavia and engaged in the hunt for the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. After the Norwegian Campaign she participated in the operations hunting the German battleship Bismarck and, together with the cruiser “Kenya”, intercepted one of the German supply ships, “Belchen”, on 3 June 1941.
Between July and August 1941, as part of Force K with the Home Fleet, she was involved in “Operation Gauntlet”, with operations to Spitzbergen and Bear Island. After one of these sorties, in company with the cruiser “Nigeria”, she intercepted a German troop convoy off Northern Norway, and the German ship “Bremse” was sunk. Later that year she was transferred to the Mediterranean and arrived in Alexandria on 21 October 1941 to join a new Force K, where the ship received a new high-contrast paint scheme, typical for this theatre of operations.
On 9 November 1941, Force K, consisting of “Tyne”,”Aurora”, “Penelope”, “Lance” and “Lively”, she was involved in the destruction of the Beta Convoy. In the resulting battle the Italian destroyer “Fulmine” was sunk, as well as the German transports “Duisburg” and “San Marco”, the Italian transports “Maria”, “Sagitta” and “Rina Corrado”, and the Italian “Conte di Misurata” and “Minatitlan”. The Italian destroyers “Grecale” and “Euro” were damaged.
On 24 November Force K, intercepted an Axis convoy about 100 nautical miles west of Crete. The Axis convoy was bound from the Aegean to Benghazi. The two German transports in the convoy, “Maritza” and “Procida”, were both sunk by H.M.S. “Penelope” and H.M.S. “Lively” despite the presence of the Italian torpedo boats “Lupo” and “Cassiopea”. On 1 December 1941 Force K, with “Tyne”, “Penelope” and ”Lively”, attacked the Mantovani Convoy. The Italian destroyer “Alvise Da Mosto” and the sole cargo ship “Mantovani” were sunk. H.M.S. “Tyne” next participated in the First Battle of Sirte on 17 December 1941. On 19 December, while steaming off Tripoli, she was heavily damaged in a mine field and was forced to retire to Malta for hull repairs.
After repairs, which lasted several months into summer 1942, she returned to service in the MTO and joined Force H. In November she became part of the Centre Task Force for the Landings in North Africa, Operation Torch. Off Oran, she engaged the Vichy French destroyers “Tramontane” and “Tornad”e on 8 November 1942, damaging the former so badly that it had to be beached. The following day she badly damaged the destroyer “Épervier” and drove it ashore. By early December 1942 she was operating as part of Force Q at Bône against the Axis evacuation and supply convoys between Trapani and Tunis.
However, “Tyne” was hit on 20 December 1942 off Trapani (Sicily) by an air-dropped torpedo. She caught fire, had two of her turrets out of action and was badly flooded. Later that day she was attacked once more by German dive-bombers, and a fatal bomb hit at the ship’s stern eventually led to her loss the following day. 115 men were killed through the attacks, the rest, more than two-thirds of the crew, was rescued.
All River-class ships had a very active war career and proved to be satisfactory in service, even though they were hardly a match for full-fledged battleships and worked best in conjunction with other ships. Especially in the Mediterranean they were very effective in protecting crucial convoys to Malta and even managed to see off some ships of the Italian Royal Navy. However, their outdated WWI machinery became their Achilles heel and limited their potential, and the relatively light main guns lacked range and firepower to take on major enemy ships their own.
From 1940 on the ships were to be replaced by the much more modern and better-equipped new Dido-class cruisers, but a shortage of guns for them, due to difficulties in manufacturing them, delayed their introduction so that the River-class cruisers had to soldier on. Two ships, “Tyne” and “Thames”, were lost, and the three post-war survivors “Trent”, “Severn” and “Mersey”, were immediately put into reserve after the end of hostilities in Europe and quickly broken up.
General characteristics:
Displacement: 5,100 long tons (5,200 t) (standard)
Length: 500 ft (152.4 m)
Beam: 47 ft (14.2 m)
Draft: 16 ft (4.8 m)
Draught: 12 ft 6 in (3.8 m) (deep)
Armor: Belt: 64 mm (3 in), Deck: 29 mm (1 in)
Complement: 450
Propulsion:
12× Admiralty boilers with 4× geared steam turbines, developing 90,000 shp (67,000 kW)
and driving four shafts
Performance:
Top speed: 36 knots (67 km/h; 41 mph)
Range: 5,000 nmi (9,300 km; 5,800 mi) at 14 kn (26 km/h; 16 mph)
Armament (after conversion):
12× 5.25 guns (133 mm) 50 caliber guns in six twin turrets
4× twin QF 2-pounder (40 mm) "pom-pom" AA guns in powered mounts
2× triple 21-inch (533 mm) torpedo tubes
2× throwers and 2× racks astern with 48 depth charges
The kit and its assembly:
The Royal Navy’s River-class light cruisers never existed. These fictional interwar ships were based on the Dido-class cruisers’ concept, just placed in an earlier generation and realized on the basis of an old/outdated ship. Inspiration came with an aftermarket set of six 1:700 white metal turrets that I came across recently, and I wanted to use it to build something like the American Atlanta-class light cruisers with a specialized AA armament.
However, this armament called for a suitable and bigger hull than my former destroyer builds, and I was eventually able to hunt down a cheap Tamiya kit of a Japanese Kuma-class light cruiser as starting point. It was perfect in size (almost exactly as big as a Dido-class cruiser!), shape and time frame, even though I I basically only used the kit’s single-piece hull as starting point. I had to modify the superstructures thoroughly to adapt the Japanese ship to the new role and also to a more Western layout and silhouette.
For instance, the typically Japanese tall “pagoda” bridge/command section of that era had to disappear, and I changed the superstructures almost completely, because the new twin turrets needed much more space than the small single guns of the Kuma cruiser. I also wanted to place them at different levels, and this called for suitable staggered platforms, too.
Initially there was the plan to mount the six turrets in groups of three at both bow and stern, but it was soon clear that this would not work – this arrangement would have been too long and too high, too, so that I went with two staggered pairs. I also wanted to give the ship – unlike the American Atlanta-class ships – a catapult for an on-board aircraft, and this required some free space on deck.
With this framework I scratched new/additional superstructures, using leftover pieces from the two recently built Matchbox K-class destroyers and from a Revell H.M.S. Ark Royal carrier. Everything evolved through trial-and error, in an attempt to find a plausible layout for all the deck equipment. The lowered hull section for the Kuma-class’ front torpedo tubes was filled with a cabin and re-purposed for lifeboats. Then the initially continuous superstructure was split to make room for the steam catapult amidships at deck level. The rear turrets eventually found their final places on a separate superstructure that would also carry the secondary mast and the crane for the floatplane, and I mounted the last two turrets in lateral positions (again somewhat inspired by the Atlanta-class arrangement with similar positions), above the Kuma-class’ openings for the rear torpedo launch tubes. These did not make sense at this position anymore, so that the OOB openings were closed/filled and moved further forward, under the new “flight deck”. Some PSR had to be done, too, in order to blend some disparate donor parts and fill the worst gaps. Therefore, the finish is certainly not as crisp as an OOB model – but I think that these flaws remained on an acceptable level.
Once the general deck layout had been settled, detail work began. This included a re-arrangement of bridge, masts and funnels, and the main deck had to offer enough space for the re-located catapult, together with the turrets in the side positions, lifeboats and AA stations, which found their place at deck level and in two twin alcoves in higher positions. Fiddly stuff, and I must admit that “creating” such a battleship is conceptually not easy.
The aircraft on board is actually the OOB Kawanishi E7K floatplane from the Kuma-class cruiser kit – but it looks similar enough to a Swordfish that this illusion could be easily supported with a suitable paint scheme.
Painting and markings:
I used the opportunity to apply another typical Royal Navy paint scheme, a so-called “Alexandria-style” pattern. This was a high-contrast scheme, sometimes described as consisting of black and white, but it was typically made up from 507a (Dark Grey) and 507c (Light Grey). It had been christened after the dockyard where it had been initially applied, and it was actually not a defined pattern (like the Admiralty schemes, which had been designed at offices by people who frequently had no practical naval experience!), but rather a common but individual application of standard paints that had been in ample supply at most dockyards! The ships had to be painted with what was at hand, and so the disruptive scheme caught on and was applied, like Mountbatten Pink, to a considerable number of British ships operating in the MTO. This two-tone scheme was not intended to conceal the ships, but rather to confuse the observer concerning speed, direction and what the ship actually was.
The pattern I applied to the model was loosely based on what the cruiser H.M.S. Devonshire carried in 1941, a kind of zebra pattern with wide, well-defined block stripes. As a visual gimmick these stripes were kind of “mirrored” along a line on the hull, as if reflected by the water and therefore making assessing size or distance even more difficult.
The paints are Humbrol 147 (Light Grey, FS 36495) and 27 (Sea Grey). The deck was painted as if the wooden areas had not been overpainted yet and allowed to weather, so that the once-holystoned, yellow-ish light wood had become dull and rather grey-ish. I used Humbrol 168 (RAF Hemp) and Revell 87 (Beige) as basis, and some light shading with thinned sepia ink was done to enhance the wooden look – and it’s nice contrast to the rather cold, grey camouflage. Metal decks, turret tops and the bow area were painted with Revell 47, simulating 507b (Medium Grey). Areas around the bridge were painted with Humbrol 62 (Leather) to simulate Corticene coating.
I originally wanted to paint the model in separate elements before final assembly, but this was not possible due to the many adjustments. The model was slightly weathered with a highly thinned black ink wash. Some Sienna Brown water paint was used for rust stains here and there. Portholes along the hull and on the superstructures were created with a thin black felt tip pen. The same tool was used to paint the muzzles of the guns. The crisp black boot topping was easy to create through the kit’s separate waterline bottom – OOB it comes in red, and it just had to be re-painted.
The kit’s segments were sealed with a coat of acrylic matt varnish before final assembly. Finally, rigging with heated and extended dark grey sprue material was done and paper flags were added.
It is not obvious, but the fictional H.M.S. “Tyne” took more scratchwork and mods than one would expect – it was/is almost a scratch build on the basis of a stock cruiser hull. More or less, the whole superstructure was re-arranged and the whole armament is new, but I think that the outcome looks quite plausible. The camouflage – even though only consisting of two shades of grey - looks interesting, too, and I think that the confusing effect becomes obvious in some of the beauty pics.