The Noon Gun

Exactly at noon, the cannon fired, and the pigeons did what pigeons do when a cannon fires, which was to leave immediately and come back in three minutes, having learned nothing. The Noon Gun at Signal Hill in Cape Town had been firing every day except Sundays and public holidays since 1806. This was longer than any employee at any company in any country had ever maintained a schedule, and Sipho considered it his personal obligation not to be the one who broke the streak. He was the gunner. This was his title. His actual rank in the South African National Defence Force was something longer and less interesting, but "gunner" was what people called him and "gunner" was what he answered to, and he had been doing it for fourteen years, which made him the second-longest-serving noon gunner in history. The longest had served for twenty-two years and had retired to Stellenbosch, where noon was presumably just noon and not a professional commitment. The gun was a Mark II signal cannon. It fired a blank charge, which was important. The first few tourists who witnessed the firing always looked around nervously afterward, checking for damage, and Sipho had developed a small speech for them. "No projectile," he said. "Just noise. The only casualty is the pigeons' dignity, and they recover quickly." The pigeons did recover quickly. They were Cape Town pigeons, a subspecies distinguished from other pigeons by their total lack of survival instinct and their willingness to stand on a cannon one minute before it fired, having stood on it the day before one minute before it fired, and the day before that. Sipho respected their commitment to ignoring evidence. The cannon sat in a small courtyard on Signal Hill, overlooking the harbour. The view was the kind that real estate agents described using words like "panoramic" and "breathtaking" and that Sipho described using the word "nice," because he had seen it every working day for fourteen years and if he started finding it breathtaking at this point it would mean something had gone wrong with either the view or his brain. His routine was precise. He arrived at eleven. He inspected the gun, which took five minutes and which he did with a thoroughness that the cannon probably didn't require but which Sipho believed in the way that some people believed in stretching before exercise. He loaded the charge at eleven-thirty. He checked the timing signal from the observatory, which came via a GPS-synchronised system that was accurate to within a fraction of a second. The old system had used a telegraph signal. Before that, a man on Signal Hill had watched for a time ball to drop at the observatory and fired by eye. That man had been accurate to within about two seconds, which was either impressive or terrifying depending on how you felt about artillery and estimation. At 11:58, Sipho opened the breach, inserted the charge, and closed it. At 11:59, he stood beside the cannon and waited. The tourists gathered. Some took videos. A child asked his mother if it would be loud, and the mother said "a little," which was a lie of the kind that parents tell to preserve domestic peace, because the cannon was extremely loud, as objects that were designed to be heard by ships at sea in 1806 tended to be. At noon, exactly, Sipho pulled the lanyard. The bang rolled down Signal Hill and across the city. It bounced off the buildings in the Waterfront and echoed off Table Mountain and dispersed into the southern sky, where it became part of the general atmospheric noise of a city that had been listening to this sound for two hundred and eighteen years. The pigeons left. The tourists applauded. The child cried, briefly. His mother gave Sipho a look that communicated, with the efficiency of a signal cannon, that "a little" had been a miscalculation. Sipho checked the gun. He cleaned the breach. He secured the courtyard. He ate his lunch — a sandwich his wife packed, always cheese and chutney, always on brown bread, a consistency that matched his professional standards — and looked at the view, which was nice. At one o'clock, he drove down the hill. The rest of his day was ordinary. Shopping, errands, a phone call to his daughter at university who was studying engineering and who found her father's job amusing in a way she tried to hide and failed. "You fire a cannon," she said once. "That's your job. You fire a cannon once a day." "At noon." "At noon. And then what?" "Then I clean the cannon." "And then?" "Then I go home." She laughed. He laughed too. It was funny. It was also true, and serious, and important in a way that was hard to explain to someone who hadn't stood on a hill every day for fourteen years and fired a sound that an entire city set its clocks by. The Noon Gun was a fact. Noon happened. The cannon confirmed it. The pigeons left and came back. The city heard it and knew, without checking, that it was twelve o'clock and that the world, for at least this one second, was exactly on time.