AtDTDA: 18 Anxious voices out of megaphones [518]

[Mark Kohut]

Yes, a wonderful internal metaphor for the War juggernaut, the juggernaut of modernity.....

robinlandseadel at comcast.net wrote:  One of the author's best set-pieces, a wonderful piece of theater,
the transformation of the Stupendica should be re-read in full:

Anxious voices out of megaphones hitherto unnoticed began calling the crew to 
general quarters. Hydraulics engaged, as entire decks began ponderously to 
slide, fold and rotate, and passengers found themselves, often lethally, in the 
way of this booming and shrieking steel metamorphosis. Bells, gongs, bos'n's 
pipes, steam sirens added to the cacophony. Stewards threw off their white 
livery to reveal dark blue Austro-Hungarian naval uniforms, and started shouting 
orders at the civilians who moments ago had been ordering them around, and who 
now mostly were wandering the passageways disoriented and increasingly fearful. 
"Right full rudder!" the Captain cried, and throughout the gigantic vessel, as 
the helm responded and the ship began to heel sharply over, approaching ever 
closer to her design maximum of nine degrees, hundreds of small inconveniences 
commenced, as bottles of perfume went sliding off the tops of vanity tables, 
wineglasses in the dining room tipped over and soaked the 
table linen, dance partners who would rather have kept an appropriate distance 
lurched into one another, causing foot injuries and couture damage, assorted 
objects in the crew's spaces fell from channel bars serving as shelves next to 
upper bunks in a shower of pipes, tobacco-pouches, playing cards, pocket flasks, 
vulgar souvenirs of exotic ports of call, descending now and then onto officer's 
heads—All full ahead!" as forgotten sandwiches and pastries to which entropy 
had been typically unkind made themselves known amid multilingual expressions 
of distaste, clouds of dust and soot descended from overheads throughout the 
vessel, and the roach population, newborns, nymphs, and grizzled oldtimers 
alike, imagining some global calamity, ran where they might at the highest 
speeds available to them given the general uproar.


       
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