Looking north, there was nothing between us and Iceland; looking a little north-east, we were only three hundred miles from Cuxhaven, about three hundred and twenty miles to Heligoland, and nothing like that to the Frisian Islands just below the mouth of the Kiel Canal. So much for that, and now to be more local.
From the foreshore, it was about a mile and a half over the marshes to the sea at low tide. At ordinary high tide it was about a mile. With spring tides and a rare off-sea wind blowing due north, the marshes were covered right up to the foreshore. This happened about twice in the year, and then they were only covered for a depth of about five or six feet, if that. The foreshore, as it is called, is a somewhat misleading term. It did not in the least resemble what one generally associates with the word. It was simply a grassy bank covered with furze bushes and with a grass road going right along it. The coarse grass sloped down till the mud was met. Now this mud was a sort of turfy peat on the surface, covered with marrum grass. One could walk on it with perfect safety, it was as hard as an ordinary field, but it was everywhere intersected with creeks of varying depth. Some of these were little runnels a foot deep, some of them had steep sides of ten or twelve feet and were crossed by narrow planks in permanent position. The sides were of mud as black as a truffle—I have really no other simile which so exactly fits the case—and at the bottom was two or three feet of water covering softer and more dangerous mud.
At high tide these deeper creeks had seven or eight feet of water in them. Then, at various points upon the marsh, were creeks which were really like tidal rivers, only that they ended at the foreshore, as a railway line ends at a terminus. These were huge trenches, wider than the widest canal, some of them seventy or eighty yards across. The walls of mud were precipitous, twenty and even thirty feet high. The largest of these had many feet of water in them at all states of the ebb and flow, but when the tide was full they were almost brimming and could have floated a fair-sized ship.
Anything more utterly desolate and forlorn, even on a bright, sunlit day, than these sullen, winding waterways, so far from the habitations of man, can hardly be conceived. They were the haunt of innumerable fowl. Herons stood on the brink and transfixed flat-fish with their long, spear-like beaks. The wild duck gathered in the little bays and estuaries formed by their convolutions. The red-shank and the green-shank whistled over them at all hours.
The two largest creeks of all were known as Garstrike and Thirty Main. It was from the heads of these waters that the gun-punts started on their dangerous nightly mission, following this or that creek in and out, wherever there was water. Garstrike had always ten feet of water in it at low tide, but Thirty Main was the largest by far. It stretched straight away from the sea to the foreshore. There was always at least thirty feet of water in its black, evil-looking depths. At high tide, sixty would have been nearer the mark. It wound among the marsh, the centre of endless smaller creeks which ran into it, the great ganglion of the whole system of nerves.
It was the study of months to know the marsh. Death had come to many fowlers there who did not know its complexities and who omitted to carry an illuminated compass for night work. Many men had been cut off on an island of mud covered with the purple sea-thistles, the bronze-green marrum grass, and the rank vegetation of the saltings. And some had been waiting in a minor creek when the tide came fast and swift through all the intricate waterways, who were unable to climb the steep sides of slippery mud, and so met their fate.
We crossed the foreshore in a minute and a half and came down upon the mud. The frozen grass crackled under our boots like little rods of glass. The shallow pools were all frozen over as we made our way round the curving shore of Garstrike.
We were on the right bank, and here and there we had to go along some of the smaller creeks that flowed into it. It is no joke to walk over a twelve-inch plank in the pitch dark with a ten-foot ditch of mud and water below. As an old marshman, I was used to it, though I had known many new-comers give these bridges a miss at the first start off. But Bernard skipped over like a bird, and after a quarter of a mile or more of slow progress, aided by my illuminated compass and a faint, ghostly light from the rising moon, we got to the gun-pit marked upon the map.
Immediately to our left was a low punt-house dug into the steep mud-bank of Garstrike and entered at the shore end by a rough ladder. The pit was five feet deep; there was a rough board for a seat and there was about a foot of water in the bottom—rain-water, which had fallen during the last few days. This, however, was nothing, and we scrambled in and sat down.
I had taken my ten-bore to the Morstone Arms, but Bernard had told me to leave it there. He had given me a heavy Service pistol, which fired ten shots in as many seconds, together with an extra clip of cartridges for the magazine. He had another in the pocket of his coat.