The actual closing of the gates was so smooth and quiet that she’d have missed it if she’d looked the other way. The only real clue it was happening was a mild rise in the chthonic thrumming of the motor in the red box. Stepping up to the window, she saw the barrier arc extruding into the channel. Looking across to the opposite bank, half a kilometer away, she saw its opposite number doing likewise. There was still that slow heaving as it responded to waves and currents in the channel, but its swing was as steady and relentless as the hand of a giant clock. The photographer danced around, trying to get the right angle, and finally clambered up on a table so that he could get both the queen and the front gate of her kingdom together in the frame. Slowly the gates severed the waterway. Off to the left, on the opposite shore, was the terminal at the Hook of Holland where the ferries went to and from England. That stretch, which was on the sea’s doorstep, was still torn by whitecaps and shrouded by spray sliced off the waves by a scything wind. But to the right, upstream of the gates, the wild waves were subsiding. Big breakers seeking entrance to her country were slamming into the barrier arcs and sending up explosive gouts, but all those tons of steel soaked up the impacts as if they were gnats ticking into the windshield of Rufus’s truck. She supposed that if you could go and rest a hand on the seven-hundred-ton steel balls in the shoulder joints you might feel a slight tickling in the tips of your fingers.