The port's western extension, a series of concrete wedges into a long beach that once lapped Malay fishing villages and lingers in the shadow of a dry and disturbed ridge, serves as the launchpad for many a survey of the southern shores. From the pier, dingy launches with fraying seats and slippery decks ferry sailors on leave from ships in anchorage as well as the crew of low spring tides. In their daily cruise through this portion of the straits, the swarthy men on the helm of these twin-screw boats must sidestep a host of other vessels as they pass a terminal of tall cranes, long boxes and transient cars.
Fishermen in lean sampans dash towards their hunting grounds on depleted reef flats. Patrol boats lurk a little off the charted routes like sea hawks on the lookout for maritime trouble. Tugboats, built like immense bathtubs with disproportionate horsepower and bearing control towers that offer a panoramic view, chug between oceanic payloads and barges shouldering sodden chunks of living seabed. The taxonomy of steel hulls escapes landlubbing minds; there are simply tiny craft with room for few, medium-sized basins that produce enough wake to rock the bumboats, and the true behemoths of international trade: container ships, bulk carriers, tankers, ro-ro vessels, general freighters and regional coasters. Oil and its byproducts are pumped into hollow vessels at Pulau Bukom. Driven by professionals to points of transit, sedans, buses and lorries roll down the ramps of floating car parks, having endured a voyage of confinement in a coffin-like hulk.
The commerical bread and butter of the harbour, however, is the transfer of containers to and from gigantic ships where every square inch of available space is devoted to freightage. Twelve-storey high cranes, mostly manned by ladies with well-wired senses, run with the quay and send down spreaders, mobile grips that lock onto the corners of the containers for lifting to deck or dock. The terminal is a platform of massive scaffolds and booms with the reach to load and unload craft in a class of their own. In the day, the scene is one of crude forms and dull hauls, of grease and diesel, smoke and dirty screens. But under the cloak of darkness, the port transforms into a land of sleek bodies and bold contours, a city of harsh light and long shadows, a watering hole for beasts of burden as long as many homes are high and far, far heavier, a symphony of giants. From windows and corridors above the stern, sailors and engineers wave to break their chore. A few bridges blast their horns to signal a change in trajectory or bid farewell to brothers-in-arms.
Look north and east, and the eye flattens the city into a single dimension, turning the financial district into a phantom that stir under dire clouds and vanishes in a veil of rain. The harbour shrinks into a hedge of arms in stiff salutes. The ships still appear larger than life, and in their passage along the southern coastline, come within precarious distance of a minuscule isle and tidal flats that fringe a dredged fairway. Turn towards Sumatra and the horizon lies low, marred only by tame bunds and a crown of broken canopies. It is here, in a maze of stormy waters and swampy woods, that the sun fades each day and fails, as always, to rouse the ghosts of islands past who ruled these straits in a grander age of maritime plunder and natural bounty.
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