Then, as being next the gate, I again called out:  When might we pass?  A Fenland man who was on duty there doing nothing said, I could pass when the bridge was shut again.  I said:  When would that be?  He said:  Could I not see that the man was cleaning the bridge?  I said that, contrasting the bridge with him and his little rag, he might go on from now to the Disestablishment of the English Church before he had done; but as for me, I desired to cross, and so did all that multitude.

Without grace they shut the bridge for us, the gate opened of itself, and in a great clamorous flood, like an army released from a siege, we poured over, all of us, rejoicing into Wringland; for so is called this flat, reclaimed land, which stands isolated between the Nen and the Ouse.

* * * * *

Was I not right in saying when I wrote about Ely that the corner of a corner of England is infinite, and can never be exhausted?

Along the cut which takes the Nen out to sea, then across some level fields, and jumping a ditch or two, one gets to the straight, steep, and high dyke which protects the dry land and cuts off the plough from the sea marshes.  When I had climbed it and looked out over endless flats to the sails under the brune of the horizon I understood the Fens.

* * * * *

Nowhere that I have been to in the world does the land fade into the sea so inconspicuously.

The coasts of western England are like the death of a western man in battle—­violent and heroic.  The land dares all, and plunges into a noisy sea.  This coast of Eastern England is like the death of one of these eastern merchants here—­lethargic, ill-contented, drugged with ease.  The dry land slips, and wallows into a quiet, very shallow water, confused with a yellow thickness and brackish with the weight of inland water behind.

I have heard of the great lakes, especially of the marshes at the mouth of the Volga, in the Caspian, where the two elements are for miles indistinguishable, and where no one can speak of a shore; but here the thing is more marvellous, because it is the true sea.  You have, I say, the true sea, with great tides, and bearing ships, and seaports to which the ships can go; and on the other side you have, inhabited, an ancient land.  There should be a demarcation between them, a tide mark or limit.  There is nothing.  You cannot say where one begins and the other ends.  One does not understand the Fens until one has seen that shore.

The sand and the mud commingle.  The mud takes on little tufts of salt grass barely growing under the harsh wind.  The marsh is cut and wasted into little islands covered at every high tide, except, perhaps, the extreme of the neaps.  Down on that level, out from the dyke to the uncertain line of the water, you cannot walk a hundred yards without having to cross a channel more or less deep, a channel which the working of the muddy tides has scoured up into the silt and ooze of the sodden land.  These channels are yards deep in slime, and they ramify like the twisted shoots of an old vine.  Were you to make a map of them as they engrave this desolate waste it would look like the fine tortuous cracks that show upon antique enamel, or the wandering of threads blown at random on a woman’s work-table by the wind.