The day begins with the sound of a ship’s horn in the harbor at Norrsbruck. The town is a jumble of neat, wide houses packed onto a spur of rock that sticks out into the Gulf of Bothnia, forming the southern shore of a slender but deep inlet lined with wharves. Half the town now turns out beneath an unsettling, turbulent peach-and-salmon dawn to see this quaint harbor being deflowered by an inexorable steel phallus. It comes complete with spirochetes: several score men in black dress uniforms stand on the top of the thing, lined up neat as stanchions. As the blast of the horn fades away, echoing back and forth between the stony ridges, it becomes possible to hear the spirochetes singing: belting out a bawdy German sea chanty which Bobby Shaftoe last heard during a convoy attack in the Bay of Biscay.