to find a channel, began to overflow up into the deserted streets, and
especially to fill the underground passages and drains, of which the
number and extent was beyond all the power of words to describe. These,
by the force of the water, were burst up, and the houses fell in.

For this marvellous city, of which such legends are related, was after
all only of brick, and when the ivy grew over and trees and shrubs
sprang up, and, lastly, the waters underneath burst in, this huge
metropolis was soon overthrown. At this day all those parts which were
built upon low ground are marshes and swamps. Those houses that were
upon high ground were, of course, like the other towns, ransacked of all
they contained by the remnant that was left; the iron, too, was
extracted. Trees growing up by them in time cracked the walls, and they
fell in. Trees and bushes covered them; ivy and nettles concealed the
crumbling masses of brick.

The same was the case with the lesser cities and towns whose sites are
known in the woods. For though many of our present towns bear the
ancient names, they do not stand upon the ancient sites, but are two or
three, and sometimes ten miles distant. The founders carried with them
the name of their original residence.

Thus the low-lying parts of the mighty city of London became swamps, and
the higher grounds were clad with bushes. The very largest of the
buildings fell in, and there was nothing visible but trees and hawthorns
on the upper lands, and willows, flags, reeds, and rushes on the lower.
These crumbling ruins still more choked the stream, and almost, if not
quite, turned it back. If any water ooze past, it is not perceptible,
and there is no channel through to the salt ocean. It is a vast stagnant
swamp, which no man dare enter, since death would be his inevitable
fate.

There exhales from this oozy mass so fatal a vapour that no animal can
endure it. The black water bears a greenish-brown floating scum, which
for ever bubbles up from the putrid mud of the bottom. When the wind
collects the miasma, and, as it were, presses it together, it becomes
visible as a low cloud which hangs over the place. The cloud does not
advance beyond the limit of the marsh, seeming to stay there by some
constant attraction; and well it is for us that it does not, since at
such times when the vapour is thickest, the very wildfowl leave the
reeds, and fly from the poison. There are no fishes, neither can eels
exist i