and the channels
which ramify through them. I use the general word 'channel', but in
fact they differ widely in character, and are called in German by
various names: Balje, Gat, Loch, Diep. Rinne. For my purpose I need
only divide them into two sorts--those which have water in them at
all states of the tide, and those which have not, which dry off, that
is, either wholly or partly at low-tide.

Davies explained that the latter would take most learning, and were
to be our chief concern, because they were the 'through-routes'--the
connecting links between the estuaries. You can always detect them on
the chart by rows of little Y-shaped strokes denoting 'booms', that
is to say, poles or saplings fixed in the sand to mark the passage.
The strokes, of course, are only conventional signs, and do not
correspond in the least to individual 'booms', which are far too
numerous and complex to be indicated accurately on a chart, even of
the largest scale. The same applies to the course of the channels
themselves, whose minor meanderings cannot be reproduced.

It was on the edge of one of these tidal swatchways that the yacht
was now lying. It is called Sticker's Gat, and you cannot miss it
_[See Chart A]_ if you carry your eye westward along our course from
Cuxhaven. It was, so Davies told me, the last and most intricate
stage of the 'short cut' which the 'Medusa' had taken on that memorable
day--a stage he himself had never reached. Discussion ended, we went
on deck, Davies arming himself with a notebook, binoculars, and the
prismatic compass, whose use--to map the angles of the channels--was
at last apparent. This is what I saw when we emerged.

XII. My Initiation

THE yacht lay with a very slight heel (thanks to a pair of small
bilge-keels on her bottom) in a sort of trough she had dug for
herself, so that she was still ringed with a few inches of water, as
it were with a moat.

For miles in every direction lay a desert of sand. To the north it
touched the horizon, and was only broken by the blue dot of Neuerk
Island and its lighthouse. To the east it seemed also to stretch to
infinity, but the smoke of a steamer showed where it was pierced by
the stream of the Elbe. To the south it ran up to the pencil-line of
the Hanover shore. Only to the west was its outline broken by any
vestiges of the sea it had risen from. There it was astir with
crawling white filaments, knotted confusedly at one spot in the
north-west, wh