patches of wet, out of which the tree-stumps stand, and beyond which
again mud-heaps and banks and groups of reeds leave undetermined, for
one hundred yards after another, the limits of the vast stream. At last,
if he has a boat with him, he may make some place where he has a clear
view right across to low trees, tiny from their distance, similarly half
swamped upon a further shore, and behind them a low escarpment of bare
earth. That is the Mississippi nine times out of ten, and to an
Englishman who had expected to find from his early reading or his maps a
larger Thames it seems for all the world like a stretch of East Anglian
flood, save that it is so much more desolate.

The maps are coloured to express the claims of Governments. What do they
tell you of the social truth? Go on foot or bicycling through the more
populated upland belt of Algiers and discover the curious mixture of
security and war which no map can tell you of and which none of the
geographies make you understand. The excellent roads, trodden by men
that cannot make a road; the walls as ready loopholed for fighting; the
Christian church and the mosque in one town; the necessity for and the
hatred of the European; the indescribable difference of the sun, which
here, even in winter, has something malignant about it, and strikes as
well as warms; the mountains odd, unlike our mountains; the forests,
which stand as it were by hardihood, and seem at war against the
influence of dryness and the desert winds, with their trees far apart,
and between them no grass, but bare earth alone.

So it is with the reality of arms and with the reality of the sea. Too
much reading of battles has ever unfitted men for war; too much talk of
the sea is a poison in these great town populations of ours which know
nothing of the sea. Who that knows anything of the sea will claim
certitude in connexion with it? And yet there is a school which has by