Antwerp

They came into the port from the north, on the morning of the 24th, along a dyke road that had once carried sixty-tonne lorries and now carried six-metre birches.

The first crane appeared at three kilometres.

It was not its size that did something to you. It was that it was lying down. It had gone over forwards, across the quay, legs in the air, and it had stayed there, and from a distance it looked like a dead insect on a windowsill — one of the ones that fold in on themselves as they dry.

There were thirty-four of them along the dock. Eleven standing, twenty-three down, all the same way.