I should have expected. Charts are apt to
ignore the geography of the mainland, except in so far as it offers
sea-marks to mariners. On the chart this stream had been shown as a
rough little corkscrew, like a sucking-pig's tail. On the ordnance
map it was marked with a dark blue line, was labelled 'Benser Tief',
and was given a more resolute course; bends became angles, and there
were what appeared to be artificial straightnesses at certain points.
One of the threads in my skein, the canal thread, tingled
sympathetically, like a wire charged with current. Standing astraddle
on both seats, with the map close to the lamp, I greedily followed
the course of the 'tief' southward. It inclined away from the road to
Esens and passed the town about a mile to the west, diving underneath
the railway. Soon after it took angular tacks to the eastward, and
joined another blue line trending south-east, and lettered
'Esens--Wittmunde _Canal_.' This canal, however, came to an abrupt
end halfway to Wittmund, a neighbouring town.

For the first time that day there came to me a sense of genuine
inspiration. Those shallow depths and short distances, fractions of
metres and kilometres, which I had overheard from Boehme's lips at
Memmert, and which Davies had attributed to the outside channels--did
they refer to a canal? I remembered seeing barges in Bensersiel
harbour. I remembered conversations with the natives in the inn,
scraps of the post-master's pompous loquacity, talks of growing
trade, of bricks and grain passing from the interior to the islands:
from another source--was it the grocer of Wangeroog?--of expansion of
business in the islands themselves as bathing resorts; from another
source again--von Bruening himself, surely--of Dollmann's personal
activity in the development of the islands. In obscure connexion with
these things, I saw the torpedo-boat in the Ems-Jade Canal.

It was between Dornum and Esens that these ideas came, and I was
still absorbed in them when the train drew up, just upon nine
o'clock, at my destination, and after ten minutes' walk, along with a
handful of other passengers, I found myself in the quiet cobbled
streets of Esens, with the great church steeple, that we had so often
seen from the sea, soaring above me in the moonlight.

XXVI. The Seven Siels

SELECTING the very humblest _Gasthaus_ I could discover, I laid down
my bundle and called for beer, bread, and _Wurst._ The landlord, as I
had e