rt of navigation. Wherever the ocean swell penetrated, or the
wind blew straight down a long deep channel, we had to be very
cautious and leave good margins. 'That's the sort of place you
mustn't ground on,' Davies used to say.

In the end we traversed the Steil Sand again, but by a different
swatchway, and anchored, after an arduous day, in a notch on its
eastern limit, just clear of the swell that rolled in from the
turbulent estuary of the Elbe. The night was fair, and when the tide
receded we lay perfectly still, the fresh wind only sending a lip-lip
of ripples against our sides.

XIII. The Meaning of our Work

NOTHING happened during the next ten days to disturb us at our work.
During every hour of daylight and many of darkness, sailing or
anchored, aground or afloat, in rain and shine, wind and calm, we
studied the bed of the estuaries, and practised ourselves in
threading the network of channels; holding no communication with the
land and rarely approaching it. It was a life of toil, exposure, and
peril; a struggle against odds, too; for wild autumnal weather was
the rule, with the wind backing and veering between the south-west
and north-west, and only for two placid days blowing gently from the
east, the safe quarter for this region. Its force and direction
determined each fresh choice of ground. If it was high and northerly
we explored the inner fastnesses; in moderate intervals the exterior
fringe, darting when surprised into whatever lair was most
convenient.

Sometimes we were tramping vast solitudes of sand, sometimes scudding
across ephemeral tracts of shallow sea. Again, we were creeping
gingerly round the deeper arteries that surround the Great Knecht,
examining their convolutions as it were the veins of a living tissue,
and the circulation of the tide throbbing through them like blood.
Again, we would be staggering through the tide-rips and overfalls
that infest the open fairway of the Weser on our passage between the
Fork and the Pike. On one of our fine days I saw the scene of
Davies's original adventure by daylight with the banks dry and the
channels manifest. The reader has seen it on the chart, and can, up
to a point, form his opinion; I can only add that I realized by
ocular proof that no more fatal trap could have been devised for an
innocent stranger; for approaching it from the north-west under the
easiest conditions it was hard enough to verify our true course. In a
period so fu