The cinema : 1952 (1952)

THE TWELVE APOSTLES 159 no more, its friend and brother, the once powerful and famous armoured cruiser The Twelve Apostles, is still alive. In chains it stands, this once heroic figure, shackled to the rocky shore, held down to the immovable sandy sea floor by iron anchors in one of the more distant bends of the so-called Sukharnaya Balka. Here, in deep caves that continue the bends of the gulf into the heart of the mountains, hundreds and thousands of mines are stored. Like a watchful Cerberus in chains, the rusty grey body of The Twelve Apostles guards their approaches. But there are no gun turrets, no masts, no flagstaffs, no captain's bridge on the huge wide back of this sleeping watch-dog. Time has made off with them all. Only its tiered iron belly sometimes echoes the rumble of wagonettes laden with the heavy deadly contents of its metallic vaults ... mines, mines, mines. The carcass of The Twelve Apostles has also become a storehouse for mines. That 's why its grey body is so carefully held in place, tied and chained to solid ground mines don't like jolting, mines must not be disturbed, mines demand quiet and peace. * The Twelve Apostles seems to have frozen into eternal immobility, like the twelve stone images of Christ's disciples lining Romance portals ; these are just as grey, immobile, weatherbeaten and pock-marked by the inclemencies of time as the sides of the iron nave, the iron cathedral half submerged in the quiet waters of Sukharnaya Balka. But fate has decreed that the iron whale shall wake again. That it shall bestir itself again. That it shall once again turn its nose, which seemed burrowed forever into the cliff, towards the open sea.