Salisbury
Plain, runs right across the face of Surrey and Kent, and, bifurcating
near Canterbury, falls sheer into the sea at the end of either fork by
Ramsgate or Dover. But in earlier days Ruim Isle was not joined as now
by flats and marshes to the adjacent mainland; the chalk dipped under
the open Wantsum Strait, much as the chalk of Hampshire dips to-day
under the Solent Sea, and reappeared again on the other side in the
Thanet Downs, as it reappears in the Isle of Wight at the ridge of St.
Boniface and the central hills about Newport and Carisbrooke. For now
the murder indeed is out, and you have discovered already that
Ruim--his dim, mysterious Ruim--is only just the commonplace,
vulgarized Isle of Thanet.

Still, it is not without cause that I have ventured to call it by that
strange and now almost forgotten old-world name. There is reason, we
know, in the roasting of eggs, and, if I have gone out of my way to
introduce the ancient isle to you by its title of Ruim, it is in order
that we might start clear of the odour of tea and shrimps, the
artificial niggers, and cheap excursionists, that the name of Thanet
brings up most prominently at the present day before the travelled mind
of the modern Londoner. I want to carry you back to a time when
Ramsgate was still but a green gap in the long line of chalk cliff, and
Margate but the chine of a little trickling streamlet that tumbled
seaward over the undesecrated sands; when a broad arm of the sea still
cut off Westgate from the Reculver cliffs, and when the tide swept
unopposed four times a day over the submerged sands of Minster Level.
You must think of Thanet as then greatly resembling Wight in
geographical features, and the Wantsum as the equivalent of the Solent
Sea.

In the very earliest period of our history, before ever the existing
names had been given at all to the towns or villages--nay, when the
towns and villages themselves were not--Ruim was already a noteworthy
island. For there is now very little doubt indeed that Thanet is the
Ictis or 'Channel Island' to which Cornish tin was conveyed across
Britain for shipment to the continent. The great harbour of Britain was
then the Wantsum Sea, known afterwards as the Rutupine Port, and later
still as Sandwich Haven. To that port came Gaulish and Phoenician
vessels, or possibly even at times some belated Phocaean galley from
Massilia. But the trade in tin was one of immense antiquity, long
antedating these