Embarkation

As they walked into the terminal he was taken aback by the sheer size of it, it looked as though it stretched into the distance, the far horizon. A seething mass of humanity swayed in front of him looking as though they were aimless and disorganized from his perspective. He thought of the possibilities for chaos and confusion.

People chattered and babbled noisily around him there was a undercurrent of excitement and anxiety. As people entered they were initially unsure what to do and surged forward but terminal workers gently and firmly guided them into two separate queues. "Not much in the way of crowd control" he thought.

As he walked slowly forward in his queue stanchions appeared and the crowd dissolved into the singular as one by one the people made their way forward to the customs desks. There were no velvet ropes, no grandeur, but sensible retractable belts. These barriers were there to show the way in an orderly fashion rather than to hem people in. He noticed how it is in the nature of man to approve of order over disorder as one of the belts loosened from its fitting and a man in the queue fixed it firmly back in place.

The few dark thoughts about his surroundings that he was having started to lift as he finally came to one of the desks and handed over his passport and his documents. He felt he would soon be back in the light of day and out of this over sized human barn. The excitement of his vacation lay ahead. When he had entered it had looked like a mass of confusion, but it had turned out not so bad after all.