t was motionless, and the water round her visibly lower.
Petulant waves slapped against her sides, but, scattered as my senses
were, I realized that there was no vestige of danger. Round us the
whole face of the waters was changing from moment to moment,
whitening in some places, yellowing in others, where breadths of sand
began to be exposed. Close on our right the channel we had left began
to look like a turbid little river; and I understood why our progress
had been so slow when I saw its current racing back to meet the Elbe.
Davies was already below, laying out a more than usually elaborate
lunch, in high content of mind.

'Lies quiet, doesn't she?' he remarked. 'If you _do_ want a sit-down
lunch, there's nothing like running aground for it. And, anyhow,
we're as handy for work here as anywhere else. You'll see.'

Like most landsmen I had a wholesome prejudice against running
aground', so that my mentor's turn for breezy paradox was at first
rather exasperating. After lunch the large-scale chart of the
estuaries was brought down, and we pored over it together, mapping
out work for the next few days. There is no need to tire the general
reader with its intricacies, nor is there space to reproduce it for
the benefit of the instructed reader. For both classes the general
map should be sufficient, taken with the large-scale fragment _[See
Chart A]_ which gives a fair example of the region in detail. It will
be seen that the three broad fairways of the Jade, Weser, and Elbe
split up the sands into two main groups. The westernmost of these is
symmetrical in outline, an acute-angled triangle, very like a sharp
steel-shod pike, if you imagine the peninsula from which it springs
to be the wooden haft. The other is a huge congeries of banks, its
base resting on the Hanover coast, two of its sides tolerably clean
and even, and the third, that facing the north-west, ribboned and
lacerated by the fury of the sea, which has eaten out deep cavities
and struck hungry tentacles far into the interior. The whole
resembles an inverted E, or, better still, a rude fork, on whose
three deadly prongs, the Scharhorn Reef, the Knecht Sand, and the
Tegeler Flat, as on the no less deadly point of the pike, many a good
ship splinters herself in northerly gales. Following this simile, the
Hohenhoern bank, where Davies was wrecked, is one of those that lie
between the upper and middle prongs.

Our business was to explore the Pike and the Fork