But Captain Howard Stansbury, who knew better, watched the distant Wasatch pass as he piloted, serpentine, his ship counter-clockwise around the lake, at ease in his prime, his personal timepiece stashed to a satchel, the company’s chronometers safely placed in their soft-cushioned, velvet-lined case, prepared for the purpose, and always strapped, on the trail, with care in the middle seat of an easy ambulance or spring-wagon, allowed to play freely in the gimbals, with only a sufficient quantity of curled hair placed in rings upon their faces so as to restrict their oscillations within proper limits inside the box, bowing his head again to gaze at the sodium-coated rocks and gravel, their semblance a symbol of the waters’ stillness, visible beneath the shallows of the lake as if calculating the craft of the movement beneath a beveled crystal, where the pressurized displacement from the passing hull of the Salicornia stirred the silt of the lake-bed like callis sand — reddish and suspended in the water — ed-dying into swirls and reverse currents and the counter-curls of vortices unfurling in the surfless, torvid waters with the turbu-lent, nonlaminar flow regime of the dynamic fluid strata of the salt-chilled thermocline like the calculated cycles and counterrevolutions of cams and nested wheels before resettling, with a siren twist, in a rain of pluvial sediment felled beneath the tyrant’s fist of gravity like the red alluvium of strife.