Sunday, February the 7th, 2010

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The Sinus Chambers

So here they are then, the sinus chambers. Not, as you might think, inside somebody's head, but out in the open, in a field, enormous, built of some tough metal, with rivets. They can be seen for miles around, for this is a flat country, parts of it below sea level, though we are far from the coast. Though so easily visible, lots and lots of people have come to the field to get a closer look. There are picnics taking place, some in the shadow cast by the mighty sinus chambers beneath the sun glittering in a cloudless blue. Awestruck tinies gasp, as do their parents, who forget the picnic sausages and lemonade as they gaze up at the giant construction.

It being a field, we have field officers stationed here and there to keep order. We have people on the ground, too, lying flat, at regular intervals, all the way from the coach park to the ground just yards from where the sinus chambers tower over us. Both the field officers and the people on the ground have been issued with badges as identification. The badges are enamel, and have upon them a device showing the sinus chambers in miniature and an arrow pointing up towards their own, inside-the-head, sinus chambers. Everybody has had to be very careful when pinning on their badges to ensure they are correctly aligned. Imagine the rumpus if an arrow pointed in the wrong direction.

During the afternoon the huge metal sinus chambers slowly fill up with liquid. It has been specially prepared by boffins using a formula they have kept secret from rival boffins, some foreign, some bad. When the fluid reaches a level marked upon the side of each sinus chamber in fluorescent zalemba, a hooter will be sounded, and the draining will begin. The piping and the siphons and the funnels and the nozzles have been checked and re-checked by a specialist team flown in from a far off country of which we know little.

Picnic hampers are packed away, and the shrieks of delight and frolic die in the throats of the tinies and their parents. In the coach park, the drivers huddled by the kiosk stub out their cigarettes, and gaze towards the field. Those who hold to their Catholicism make hurried signs of the cross. Even the birds perched in the trees are silenced.

There is a deafening metallic judder and clank. And then the gurgling begins…