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It was an adventure sliding down to dinner. Tibe fell from top to bottom, into a kind of black well, and upset Lady MacNairne completely. She said she hated Enkhuisen, and she thought it a dispensation of Providence that the sand had come and silted it up.
The ships themselves were there, great monsters of iron and steel, scaled and honeycombed with red rust. But the wharf-slips had long since silted up, and the vessels, careening little by little with the subsidence of the water, had finally broken away from the restraining hawsers and lay on their beam-ends in the mud, a sorrowful spectacle. The moon was rising and it was time to go ashore.
Anciently the Rhine at this part of its course was an abounding stream, but by the ninth century the sands at Katwijk had silted it up, and it was only in the beginning of last century that its way to the sea was made clear. The Sunken City More than six centuries ago Stavoren was one of the chief commercial towns of Holland.
Everywhere it consists of the same homogeneous mud, destitute of stratification the only signs of successive accumulation being where the Nile has silted up its channel, or where the blown sands of the Libyan desert have invaded the plain, and given rise to alternate layers of sand and mud.
We anchored on just such a day as this has been, off a little old river-mouth, so badly silted that she had to lie well out. A chief in a campong half a day inland had promised to send some specimens down that evening, armor, harps, stone Priapuses, and birds of paradise. The men were to come overland, and would have no boats.
The sedge-birds kept just in front of me, now busy on a willow-stole, and concealed in the grasses and moss which grew out of the decaying wood; now among the sedges covering the mudbanks where the brook had silted up; now in the hedge which divided the willows from the meadow.
And this old man of peace, who loved all boys and the laughter of youth, would have had to duck very low and make sudden bolts across open spaces, where parapets and earthworks had silted down, in order to avoid those sniping bullets which came snapping across the dead ground from a row of slashed trees and a few scarred ruins on the edge of the enemy's lines.
We opened several, but unfortunately they contained nothing but bones. Originally this town must have been built on an island, or an artificial moat must have been dug round it to protect it on the mainland side; this is now silted up, but is traceable all along.
They passed into old Batavia, amid its swamps and silted canals. Further along lay Welterreden, the new city, with its magnificent avenues and residences; but the business in hand lay in the older section. Here, among clustering mangroves, huge rooted and malarial, Chinese and native kampongs huddled in the shadow of decaying ruins.
She lay upon an even keel, her forefoot deep-buried in the shifting sand that had silted about her with the tide, and beholding her paint and gilding blackened and scorched by fire, her timbers rent and scarred by shot, I knew this fire-blackened, shattered wreck would never sail again.
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