Colophon.

This site was conceived as the Wadi Hammamat out of Aberdeen lay anchored off the shores of Malta. No moon that night. The grease fires were lit under tarp hoods on decks fore and aft. Nothing of Dwejra Bay could be seen, but we knew even in the dark that the hills of Gozo loomed ahead of us. What men would sacrifice on those hills would not be known for several days yet. Someone belowdecks strummed a guitar. The swallows in the galley were silent. Men smoked, waited, marked the stars.

The HTML and CSS were written the next morning. The site's first iteration was taken down, longhand, in the margins of a Portuguese Bible. How that particular book found its way onboard is unclear — few of the sailors had any use for it, being mostly Malays and Ethiopians. After morning muster, the code was transferred to punchcards for processing by the ship's Burroughs B5000, usually a job for six men that took nine of us to complete due to the language barriers that had led to running aground off Good Hope and, in Alexandria, nearly cost us our cargo of Madagascar vanilla. All doctype specifications and root-level elements were tagged according to the B5000's descriptor-based architecture and translated to the IBM 704 mainframe platform using that system's automatic floating point processors. The System/360 was not used for this project, for obvious backwards-compatability reasons.

Most of the images on this site were developed before we set sail. The original plates and film have been archived and are waiting in Aberdeen for our return. Final image files were processed in Lightning Paint and KeyCAD and the jpeg output was done before dawn as the long boats rowed to shore. This was all without benefit of calibrated CRTs or live optimized preview. Only the regiment went ashore. The site files, images, and code keys were burned onto portable optical devices and delivered back to the ship by shirtless swimming messenger. The sailors, the linens from Cairo, and the cases of vanilla stayed on the ship. Everything was uploaded to the hosting server via standard ship-to-web transfer protocols as the sun rose over Gozo. As silently as they could, the soldiers slipped ashore.