The massive chalk of Europe lies below the English Channel, under much of northern France, under bits of Germany and Scandinavia, under the Limburg Province of the Netherlands, and—from Erith Reach to Gravesend—under fifteen miles of the lower Thames.
My grandson Tommaso appears out of somewhere and picks up a cobble from the bottom of the Thames. The tide is out. The flats are broad between the bank and the water.
Small boats, canted, are at rest on the riverbed. Others, farther out on the wide river, are moored afloat—skiffs, sloops, a yawl or two. Tommaso is ten. The rock in his hand is large but light. He breaks it against the revetment bordering the Gordon Promenade, in the Riverside Leisure Area, with benches and lawns under oaks and chestnuts, prams and children, picnics under way, newspapers spread like sails, and, far up the bank, a stall selling ice cream.
He cracks the cobble into jagged pieces, which are whiter than snow. This is the beginning of the Thames Estuary, where, in centuries gone, a thousand ships would be anchored, waiting to go up into London. Tommaso is taking his time with these letters, because he is using an ambitious font.
An armada of swans, in single file, swims out from near shore and toward the center of the river—thirty-eight swans. Here, above the chalk, is where the Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor, waiting for the tide to turn, while. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.
