The Marrow Coast Index

Inner Sound · Bell · Kept · one strike, twenty seconds

The bell hangs in a yoke of greenheart, twenty yards above the high-water mark on the inner channel wall. Cast in 1886, it cracked in the frost of 1911. The crack runs from the lip toward the crown and stops, as if it thought better of it. Keepers strike it by hand on the even watch and by a clockwork cam on the odd. Ships bound for the inner quay take the sound on the port bow and do not turn until it bears abeam.

Outer Reef · Diaphone · Automated · blast, then thirty seconds

The house stands where the chart prints a cross and the pilots print a warning. The diaphone is a low B: two and a half seconds of grunt, a cough on the upstroke, then silence. Automated in 1966. The compressor runs on a diesel a contractor services when he remembers. In fog the sound seems to come from the water rather than the house, which is why strangers put the reef a cable too far south.

Headland · Siren · Kept · ten-second call

Compressed air, a ten-second call, named by the keepers for the way the sound frays at the edge, like cloth left on a nail. A person still sleeps in the lee room. The Archive does not print the name. The watch is real: the log is initialled through last March, which is more than can be said for the lights authority that claims the headland and visits it in summer.

Estuary · Explosive · Silent · last fired 1948

The signal was a cotton-powder charge thrown from a cradle, once every five minutes in fog. The last charge was fired in 1948. The scorch is still on the quay wall, a black fan the height of a man. People photograph the fan and call it a sunset mark. It is a record of work. The locker with the slanted roof is empty, locked, and still smells of struck match.

Outer Reef · Siren · Silent · reed failed 1959

The reed corroded through in 1959 and was not replaced. The house was already in dispute between the authority and a salvage firm with a sentimental name. What remains is the compressor bed, four bolts, and a doorway facing the wrong sea. The name is older than the wrecks. It refers to the reed, not to a trade. Correct anyone who tells it otherwise; the Archive has had to do this twice in print.

Inner Sound · Bell · Automated · two strikes, fifteen seconds

An electric striker since 1971. The landing below was used by the sisters from the point convent to reach the infirmary on the town side when the road iced. They called the bell a candle because it was what they had when the lamp on the point failed. The striker is accurate and slightly ashamed of itself: the second blow is softer, which is the clapper returning, not a fault in the current.

Headland · Diaphone · Kept · long and short, forty seconds

Pilots use the interval to time the tide through the grey race, which runs harder than the tables admit. The long tone is G, the short is B. The keeper listens for the short tone to drop, which it does when the intake ices. That drop has saved more ships than the light on the same headland, a second-order lens Hobb dismissed as “a vanity above six cables.” He was not invited to the lighting ceremony. He attended the fog.

Estuary · Bell · Silent · yoke bare since 1962

The bell was taken off the yoke on a night in 1962 and has not been convincingly seen again. The yoke remains, and the rope, cut clean, from the top downward. Whoever did it stood on the yoke. Hobb was retired by then. The later hand added one line and stopped keeping the book, which is the only honest way to stop a book of this kind.