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 full of new excitements it is not easy for me to say when
we were hardest put to it, especially as it was a rule with Davies
never to admit that we were in any danger at all. But I think that
our ugliest experience was on the 10th. when, owing to some minute
miscalculation, we stranded in a dangerous spot. Mere stranding, of
course, was all in the day's work; the constantly recurring question
being when and where to court or risk it. This time we were so
situated that when the rising tide came again we were on a lee shore,
broadside on to a gale of wind which was sending a nasty sea--with a
three-mile drift to give it force--down Robin's Balje, which is one
of the deeper arteries I spoke of above, and now lay dead to windward
of us. The climax came about ten o'clock at night. 'We can do nothing