under which it ran by a culvert, a culvert at least as old as the
Romans. But when about a hundred years ago people began to improve the
world in those parts, they put up a pumping station and they pumped
Thames dry--since which time its gods have deserted the river.

The sources of the Ribble are in a lonely place up in a corner of the
hills where everything has strange shapes and where the rocks make one
think of trolls. The great frozen Whernside stands up above it, and
Ingleborough Hill, which is like no other hill in England, but like the
flat-topped Mesas which you have in America, or (as those who have
visited it tell me) like the flat hills of South Africa; and a little
way off on the other side is Pen-y-ghent, or words to that effect. The
little River Ribble rises under such enormous guardianship. It rises
quite clean and single in the shape of a little spring upon the
hillside, and too few people know it. The other river that flows east
while the Ribble flows west is the River Ayr. It rises in a curious way,
for it imitates the Garonne, and finding itself blocked by limestone
burrows underneath at a place called Malham Tarn, after which it has no
more trouble.

The River Severn, the River Wye, and a third unimportant river, or at
least important only for its beauty (and who would insist on that?) rise
all close together on the skirts of Plinlimmon, and the smallest of them
has the most wonderful rising, for it falls through the gorge of Llygnant,
which looks like, and perhaps is, the deepest cleft in this island, or, at
any rate, the most unexpected. And a fourth source on the mountain, a tarn
below its summit, is the source of Rheidol, which has a short but
adventurous life like Achilles.

There is one source in Europe that is properly dealt with, and where the