a brother sat up in bed and whispered:  “Look, the Star in the East.”  I turned, and one bright eye of the night was staring through the window.  Heaven knows into what profundity of ancestral darkness my brothers whisper had fallen, nor what it stirred there, but an awe, or a fear, was wakened in me which was not mine, for I remember I could not explain it, even though, at the time, the anxious direct question was put to me.  Nor can I now.  It would puzzle a psycho-analyst most assured of the right system for indexing secret human motives to disengage one shadow from another in an ancestral darkness.  That is why I merely put down here the names to be found on a chart of the North Sea, and say no more about it, being sure they will mean nothing except to those to whom they mean something.  Those words, like certain moonbeams, which stir in us that not ourselves which makes for righteousness, or lunacy, combine only by chance.  The combination which unlocks the secret cannot be stated, or it would not work.  When there is a fortuitous coincidence of the magic factors, the result is as remarkable to us as it is to those who think they know us.  When I used to stand on London’s foreshore, gazing to what was beyond our street lamps, the names on the chart had a meaning for me which is outside the usual methods of human communication.  The Dogger Bank!

Here then it was, yet still to be seen only by faith.  It was like Mrs. Harris.  I had the luck to discover that I should lose nothing through my visit; and every traveller knows how much he gains when the place he has wished to visit allows him to take away from it no less than what he brought with him.  The Bank was twenty fathoms under us.  We saw it proved at times when a little fine white sand came up, or fleshy yellow fingers, called sponge by the men, which showed we were over the pastures of the haddock.  That was all we saw of a foundered region of prehistoric Europe, where once there was a ridge in the valley of that lost river to which the Rhine and Thames were tributaries.  Our forefathers, prospecting that attractive and remunerative plateau of the Dogger, on their pilgrimage to begin making our England what it is, caught deer where we were netting cod.  I almost shuddered at the thought, as though even then I felt the trawl of another race of men, who had strangely forgotten all our noble deeds and precious memories, catching in the ruin of St. Stephen’s Tower, and the strangers, unaware of what august relic was beneath them, cursing that obstruction to their progress.  Anyhow, we should have the laugh of them there; but these aeons of time are desperate waters into which to sink one’s thought.  It sinks out of sight.  It goes down to dark nothing.

Well, it happened to be the sun of my day just then, and our time for catching cod, with the reasonable hope, too, that we should find the city still under St. Stephen’s Tower when we got back, as a place to sell our catch.