Challenge to Complacency: What Future Archaeologists Will Think of Us
I
THE archæologist has a cold and callous eye. It looks backward to the past and forward to the future and seldom pauses on the present. Walking down Fifth Avenue or Regent Street, I cannot help letting my imagination leap forward a thousand years or so. How, in that remote future, will these wide streets and concrete palaces look? What problems will they hold for the excavator of a new world that has prospered in some distant part of the globe, who has sent his reconnaissance expedition to investigate the enormous mounds, smooth and rolling and grass-covered, that will then mark the sites of capital cities of an almost-forgotten civilization?
You smile! Surely that can never happen, you say. And so smiled the Minoans of Cnossus, the ancient Indians of the vast city of Mohendjodaro in the Indus Valley, and the Mayas in their indestructible palaces of Yucatan. Yet they were forgotten for thousands of years, and only the chance of excavation brought them to light. Of course it will happen to us, yet we live in the unshaken complacency of an immovable belief that we are permanent — like those ancient Agrigentines of whom a Greek once said that ‘they live as if they were to die tomorrow, and build as if they were to live forever.’
When the crash conies and civilization decides to shift elsewhere, when London and New York are as forgotten as was Athens after the fall of Rome, or as Persepolis after Alexander had burned it, how will the change come about by which London and New York are transformed into those delectable grassy hillocks that delight the eye of the prospective excavator?
Of course one must make assumptions. Cnossus or Persepolis did not perish overnight. A mighty sacking or conflagration is not fatal. London in 16G6 started at once to recover and rebuild; Cnossus was sacked and ruined, but not reduced to a heap of rubble. Persepolis could have been remade and restored. One must assume certain political and social catastrophes that make it impossible for the inhabitants to return or to remake; some financial breakdown that forbids repair, upkeep, and restoration. And if in the dry and gentle climate of the Mediterranean, or in the dryer but hotter climate of India, several civilizations that in their bloom thought themselves as immutable as rock, as unforgettable as the sun, perished from the memory of man as utterly as if they consisted of mere squalid mud-hut villages, how much more shall London, New York, Paris, or Berlin be reduced to rolling hills of rubble under the impact of a climate that destroys with four times the speed of the climate of the Mediterranean or of India!
For what is the chief enemy of a great city, or, for that matter, of any building, but water? Water that seeps into cracks, water that freezes in those cracks and expands with a slow destructive force as great as dynamite, water that drips its way through ferro-concrete and oxidizes the immortal strength of iron and steel and reduces their power to heaps of red rust.
Let us look ahead. Imagine some devastating European-American war, a war in which the whole world is involved. Neglect grows as all energy is concentrated on the vigor of war. For a period of years there are no repairs done to cities and their buildings, no improvements, no strengthening, no painting of steel girders or refurbishing of stone surfaces. Imagine London or New York as was Vienna in 1919— paint peeling from walls, plaster cracking, encompassing grime and mildew in holes and crannies and corners. And then imagine a financial crash more desperate, more irremediable than any that the world has suffered in the last few years, a crash from which there is no escape, for the cure of which no Roosevelt appears like a deus ex machina. Fortune is not always so obliging as to produce a magician to move every rock, and we must assume an accumulation of rocks with no magician at all.
The financial hreakdowm is followed by political chaos, political chaos by public insecurity. Out of this chaos only one element will emerge organized, and that is crime. The criminal elements will feed like parasites on a tottering fabric of civilization in a way far more deadly than ever in history, if only because crime can now obtain weapons which make its offensive quality more deadly. Failure of means of communication provides just the conditions most suitable for the growth of criminal organization, which in any case has its own channels of communication. Then famine and perhaps disease reduce the population to a minimum, and so in the end develops a situation in which mass emigration has become a necessity.
The climate of the Northern States of America would force a population thus swiftly deprived of its ordinary means of subsistence steadily to the south, whether to South America or to the Southern States does not matter. But in any breakdown of organized civilization a move to a climate where the essential comforts of a primitive mode of existence are more easily obtainable becomes obvious. And so from a by now barbarized North would move upon a still stable South a horde of people virtually indistinguishable from the barbaric Europeans who moved southward upon the stable culture of the Mediterranean at various periods of history. Thus fell Mycenæ and Troy, and thus many attempts were made from the north upon Constantinople, which failed only because of the immensely superior defenses of that city.
A similar situation in England would be less easily evaded by mass movement. For in chaotic conditions the English Channel would prove a tremendous obstacle, only to be crossed by small numbers aided by a few enterprising craft, the property of pirates out for gain. Only the relatively rich would escape, and the remainder would die of starvation far more rapidly than in America; although, on the other hand, the rigors of the climate would not be so fatal to humanity as in America.
Such gloomy prognostications as these rise to my mind when I look at the neat complacent buildings of Regent Street or of the long alleys of New York. Perhaps I am a pessimist, but then I am not such a fool as to imagine that the particular kind of world I live in will go on for more than its fair share of time. Just as the average Londoner or New Yorker is incredulous that his city should not be there ten thousand years hence, so to me it is incredible that it should. And, indeed, London all but faded out of existence after the Roman departure from Britain, while New York faced catastrophe only three years ago! And the ruins of Palmyra and Baalbek and Luxor cry loudly to the living that they are only leaseholders of property that will, after the 99 or 999 or 9999 years’ lease is up, revert once more to the ground landlord.
II
But let me get down to the grim archaeological details. Let us assume our New York, smitten by its financial catastrophe, its population denuded, its rich rapidly fled, its offices empty, its lovely skyscrapers rising unlit and gloomy at night over the twin waterways, now empty of shipping, silent and dark. A bare million of inhabitants, perhaps, still live on after the general bankruptcy that fell like a plague in the early spring of 2035 a.d. Somehow they live through the hot summer, consuming the accumulated provisions of the city, living on capital. The police, unpaid and without chiefs, have fled, the criminal elements usurp government. A fitful electric lighting service is maintained in a few places, a few automobiles ply at famine prices for traffic. Substantially, New Yorkers know nothing of what is happening outside New York, and very little of what is happening there. Those who were in England during the General Strike in 1926 will remember how the first result of dislocation of all transport was the complete isolation of every city; no one knew what was going on in the country as a whole.
Summer passes and an early winter falls with a crash in November. The population, now without adequate means of heating, perish rapidly from cold and from the ravages of influenza. New York gets emptier and emptier. As winter increases, the rain and sleet come in torrents. Neglected roofs begin to leak, unrepaired walls admit water through their cracks — and then comes a spell of that sub-zero temperature that even at the best of times causes damage and upset. The damp and water freeze to ice which expands with the remorseless strength of destiny. A few walls and houses fall, skyscrapers begin to show defects. The campaniles totter and the pinnacles are unstable. And thus begins that downward movement of a great city that ends in the grassy mounds which lure the eye of the archæologist.
Slowly but inexorably the facades of towers and palaces flake off and fall to the ground. Round every mansion and every towering skyscraper is a steadily increasing circuit of accumulated fallings and droppings. For there is no one to clear it away or to repair the cracks and crevices. Like a ruthless crowbar of fate the frost peels off the outer cover of many a building and drops it crashing to the ground. In its fall the cover perhaps breaks through the roof of adjacent buildings. More ruin, more accumulations. Neglected water mains and pockets of gas burst the roadways upward into confused heaps. Every pull downward of this dreadful force known as gravity is followed by a convulsion, a push from below, just as if gravity were proving that it can act both ways.
Compared with London, New York would come to a swifter death, for New York is precariously balanced on its smooth rock. What the ice of the Glacial Age smoothed so cleanly into a platform designed for an imperial city, the ice of a post-glacial age, which still comes to sting you with the reminder that it was only a few moments of time ago that the glaciers retreated into Canada, will clear once more of impediments, though this time they will not be swept ruthlessly away, but merely left to crumble.
If you want to see the Glacial Age in New York, get on top of a bus at about 70th Street and ride down Fifth Avenue towards Battery Point. Look along the Avenue and you will see the roadway ahead undulating beautifully and harmoniously; the line of street lamps rises and falls like the rollers of the Atlantic.
The stranger seeing this for the first time is amazed. The more so if he is a Londoner, accustomed to the perfect level line of the lamps of Baker Street or of Oxford Street. Here is as voluptuous a series of curves as ever delighted an Oriental. And those are the curves worn out of your New York granite cliffs by the steady heave and grind of primeval ice in past ages, when the great face of the glaciers dropped its crashing fragments of ice into what is now New York Sound. Thus was New York forged, and the marks of its forging show to-day in that lovely line of undulating street lamps.
But to-morrow the vestiges of that ancient Glacial Age will clean the rock once more.
And so my dismal story works steadily to its conclusion. Among the shapeless heaps of rubble, concrete fragments, and red stone, amid the almost nightly crashes of falling buildings, there may still stand the vast height of the Empire State Building and the lovely knife edge of the Rockefeller tower. They are built of the most enduring of all modern materials. Yet they will not endure as has the Parthenon, for they have to face rigors of climate that Greece never even dreamed of. No ice or snow worth mention has shifted a stone of the Parthenon; no temperature of twenty degrees below zero, or worse, has driven its wedges into the cracks of any Greek, Persian, or Egyptian building. Nature has let them decline very, very gently.
After most of New York, except the newest towers, has tumbled into ruin, perhaps the twin heights of the two tallest skyscrapers will still remain, but not for very long. Soon their outer cover will flake and fall, and nothing will stand save the central cores of ferro-concrete. Slowly too this will wear and bend. Perhaps the Empire State tower will buckle and fall in one piece of its own weight; the Rockefeller building will come down in segments. But even if they lord it over the ruins for a year or two more, it is only a matter of time before they too are leveled. And where they fall what a grassy mound will rise!
On the rolling hillocks along the furrows that were once Fifth and Sixth and Seventh avenues, and the rest, will rise two vaster hills. The small advance party of excavators who are camped in tents near by will say at once, ‘Here were the principal palaces of this great capital. Here probably will be found the residence of the Chief of the ancient United States, believed to have borne the name of President. It was apparently an old family, for ever since the eighteenth century the Chieftain has always borne the same family name of President.’ Ultimately, when their supposed palaces of kings prove to be the Waldorf-Astoria or the Wool worth Building, immense volumes will be written to prove that, after all, America was a republic and not a kingdom, as her ruins might have suggested. The accurate planning of the reception office of the Waldorf-Astoria, the discovery of ancient hotel ledgers in steel safes that have been preserved under immense falls of concrete, and the general equipment of some of these palace sites will ultimately prove to the world that New York was, after all, run on democratic lines — or at least that the palaces were open to all men.
Along the grassy edge of the New York island my excavators will find the crumbling relics of ancient quays, and in the accumulated mud of the harbor wharves the skeletons of ships. But the great ice jams of the Hudson that have broken through and swept the edges of the island will have left little to find. Their sharp edges will have shaved the outlines of the island almost back again to its Glacial Age contours.
And what of London? Here things will move more slowly, but not less certainly. Instead of a grassy heap of hillocks on a smooth rock, London will end more as an enormous waste of uneven ruins, rather like the vast cities of Turkestan, Merv, or the ancient towns of the Gobi. But instead of lying gently in preserving sand, London of that distant future will be engulfed in mud and marsh. When the Thames Embankment falls, as it will do in a year or two after the final catastrophe, the tidal Thames will encroach and bite away the soft banks. And the piles of fallen masonry will be more formidable and more massive in some cases than in New York, because buildings like the Houses of Parliament are far more solid and more massively constructed than the thinly made and largely hollow skyscrapers. Westminster will revert once again to the island in a marshy shore that it originally was, but on that island will rise a very vast mound of rubble, composed of the Victoria Tower and Big Ben Tower. For the rest, London will be in the main a low stretch of uneven mounds that will be partly sunk in the soft clay soil, while New York will lie above its impermeable rock foundation.
III
The excavators of both London and New York will have considerable trouble with the enormous underground buildings and subways and tubes that penetrate everywhere. Some years ago, while excavating in Constantinople, I found the task of excavation made more complicated by finding endless systems of water supply. Apparently every third emperor had decided to enhance his reputation by installing new and more efficient water conduits. These we found at every level down to twenty-five feet. In London I can well imagine the chagrin of the excavators as they dig out Piccadilly Circus and get their sectional plans confused by the various Tube stations. And to have to clear the Grand Central Station after it had been completely silted up with mud and débris, and to pass all the earth excavated through a sieve in order to find the priceless documents preserved on the site of the Information Booth, are tasks which make me thankful that I explore only the cities of relatively simple folk.
Just as nineteenth-century history has to-day become far more burdensome a study than the history of the fourteenth century, partly because the enormous increase of population has produced more interesting individuals and more political and social activity, so the sites of the future will require at least ten times the number of excavators to handle them. Nor will those excavators be able to employ any new inventions for speeding up their excavation. Unfortunately the excavator must in all ages proceed at the speed of pick and shovel and at no faster rate. Nor can he employ any other than these primitive instruments.
In one respect the excavators of New York and London will be fortunate. Virtually all printed books and papers will have vanished as if they had never been. They will no more be found during the course of excavation than are papyri found in the slightly damp soil of Greece. The products of the printing press will have survived only in the dry climates. Perhaps, cynically enough, the only documents to be found during the excavation of London will be the Codex Sinaiticus and other works recorded on tough and almost indestructible vellum. But one will always have to make an exception in the case of such documents as have been kept in safes, for safes will undoubtedly survive for a very long time.
Yet, imagine the reconstruction of English literature of the twentieth century based on the information obtained from safes! It will prove to be a blend of the sort of English to be found on legal conveyances and on the bogus prospectuses of dubiously promoted companies!
But the epigraphist will reap a rich harvest. From the shattered remains of tombstones and foundation stones of public halls and almshouses, from the pontifical inscriptions engraved on bronze tablets on churches, and from the war memorials of various wars, he will compose a disjointed history of our life and times that would freeze our marrow if we could but read it. What fun it will be for the archæologist to compose lists of aldermen, mayors, and councilors, and attribute to them half the famous reforms of the age! To find stray fragments of Shakespeare and of Abraham Lincoln and of Emerson and of the Bible and of Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy, and to make out of them an anthology of our literature!
And what a task to classify the buildings that will be found! To fix the type of the church, the cinema, the night club, the prison, and the hotel of our day and then to identify buildings according to this classification. I can see the new Publishing House of the Christian Science movement at Boston being labeled as a night club, such is the glory of its interior and its plan; and Westminster Catholic Cathedral in London will probably be identified as a hotel on the lines of the Biltmore, while the Biltmore may be shown to be a church of some luxury sect. What fun it will all be, and what a pity we shall not be there to see!
In the abandoned countryside, things will be different. The more complex a city is, the more rapidly it will decay and fall to ruin. For all the services of a modern city are so interdependent that once one or two of these services fail the whole city is affected. In ancient. Rome or Athens there was no municipal lighting or drainage or public health to speak of. If the system broke down, you carried on quite well without it. But to-day we are utterly dependent on the services of others. And if those others fail us we are helpless.
A modern city is the most vulnerable thing in the world. I have seen two modem cities left stranded and helpless — Salonika and Constantinople. The first I saw burned to the ground in 1917, the second I saw in 1918 just after the Armistice. No words of mine can describe the complete chaos in each case.
In two hours Salonika was as helpless as any rubbish heap. After the fire had burned itself out, the masses of fallen masonry and charred ruins were well on their way to becoming a fine archaeological site. So complete was the ruin that the builders of the new Salonika a few years later merely pulled down what still-standing walls there were and leveled the rubbish to one uniform level; on this as a foundation they built their new city, so that to-day Salonika stands about six feet higher than it did before.
Constantinople in 1918 was a fully inhabited city, but then devoid of any public services for the inhabitants. There was no gas, no electricity except intermittently, no street cleaning, hardly any police, and an unsafe and erratic water supply. Yet the inhabitants somehow managed to survive until the army of occupation had set its engineers to rectify these breakdowns.
Had no one come to help, Constantinople would have died within a very few weeks. There would have been plague, famine, and massacre. Fires would have spread unchecked and crime would have been rampant. As it was, it was a common sight to see in the morning the corpses of those who had been shot by criminals during the night lying in the side streets. Dead horses lay in the gutters sometimes for days. The Turkish police, unpaid for months, could hardly be regarded as trustworthy guardians of law and order. Children starved and disease was rampant. And all this decline had taken place between November 11, 1918, and about December 31, 1918. Indeed, the resistance of a modern city to disintegrating forces is far lower than that of ancient cities, if only because the complexity of modem city life is based on the assumption that catastrophes do not occur. Simpler modes of life do not break down with that devastating swiftness with which our elaborate civilization may topple over the brink to destruction. Constantinople remains in my memory as a nightmare and as a warning. Imagine London or New York deprived of all its public services for a week only, and you will get some idea of the terrible swiftness with which decay will bring the whole organism to destruction.
IV
And so it is to the countryside that we must look for the survival of some kind of semblance of the old order, when the great metropolitan centres have crashed into ruin. Probably for years after New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and London and Edinburgh have been rendered uninhabitable the remote farmsteads of Maine and the Middle West and of Yorkshire and Cornwall will still show some kind of regular life and ordered existence. But it will be every farmstead for itself, every village its own master, every man armed, and every unit self-subsisting. The farmers will consume their own grain and their own stock; perhaps there will be a simple method of barter and exchange, though there will naturally be no further use for currency.
Some such state of affairs began to develop in the Caucasus in 1919, when from a chaos of revolution and disturbance there evolved five or six independent republican states, each about the size of a large English county. Each struck its own paper currency, which was not current or acceptable in any other republic. Each lived on its own capital and its own resources. Each was slowly dying, and only when all were incorporated in the Soviet Union did they show signs of renascence, based on a general interchange of commodities and a general discipline imposed by a central authority armed with the force to back it up.
For many years the relics of our old civilization will survive in rural regions and in small units. Slowly these units will become more and more isolated. Such was the condition of England after the Roman departure in the fifth century. Such was the state of affairs in Italy in the Dark Ages of the seventh and eighth centuries. Ancient Roman order existed in England in the Welsh and Cornish hills and moorlands until it slowly flickered out into Saxondom and a new order. Greece after the fall of the Mycenaean world was an aggregation of small units each of which hardly knew its neighbor. The immediate sequel to any universal crash has been this centrifugal tendency. As the great centres radiate an influence of decay and destruction, so the old order drifts toward the periphery, in so far as it is unable to emigrate en masse to some happier world.
The speed with which a fine system of roads will, by neglect and disuse, vanish slowly beneath the surface of the ever increasing and encroaching vegetation is astonishing. I have seen a fine system of roads which was built by the Allied armies in Macedonia gradually perish. For they corresponded, not to the natural requirements of the region, but only to temporary military necessity. Half of them have now almost faded away. Their culverts have broken, their bridges been swept away, their embankments have slipped down. The grass verge has gradually spread toward the centre of the metaling. Miniature ravines have been ploughed through the metaling here and there by torrents of winter rain. The peasants ride on their mules alongside the roadway, not on it, for the hard metaling is too much for the hoofs of their oxen and buffaloes and horses.
So the great Roman roads of Britain slowly sank out of sight and were mostly forgotten. So will the great cement turnpikes and parkways and arterial roads perish in a few years after the great catastrophe of the future.
Only the railways will remain, for the mighty embankments and cuttings have a longer life. Even so, the tunnels will fall in, the embankments will slip, and the cuttings will soon look much as the great Canal of Xerxes, through which he took his fleet, looks to-day. A few months only would let the Panama and the Suez canals fall into ruin if they are neglected. Many a time I have seen the Corinth Canal with its sides fallen in; the maintenance of it is a whole-time task, and there are constant falls. That small seaway would be rendered useless in perhaps a fortnight if its maintenance services were suspended.
England, after a hundred years of neglect following the great catastrophe, would revert almost to the same condition as that in which it was in neolithic times. The old marsh and forest areas, which then were impassable, and which archæologists now faithfully plot on their maps, would bo swamp and marsh and forest in one generation, and again impassable in two. Packs of wild dogs would rapidly degenerate into wolves, malaria would spread, and human habitations would be driven up on to the moors and dowms where they started five thousand years ago. The ancient hill camps would be inhabited once again by melancholy and degenerate agriculturists who would have to eke out their thin crops with hunting. Weapons of the hunt would be as primitive as they were at the dawn of the Iron Age. The isolation of the downlands would make collaboration between settlements almost impossible. Fortification would be as necessary against marauding humans as against wolves.
I once saw a whole valley revert to this condition in a year. For military reasons we had in 1916 to evacuate all the inhabitants from the valley of the Struma in Macedonia. Their villages lay empty and undamaged. Their dogs remained behind and would not follow their masters. In a few weeks these village dogs left their villages and formed packs which lived in holes in the ground and came out at night to steal and kill. So dangerous were they to lonely patrols and isolated soldiers that it became necessary to hunt them down and shoot them. Swamp developed with incredible speed where had once been fertile maize and cotton fields. Malaria throve as it has never thriven before in those parts. Our own army lost 50 per cent of its effectives as a result.
V
Fortunately in all these cases of incipient collapse there has been some organized power to prevent it spreading. But suppose there were no organized power left? Suppose a complete financial disaster robbed the authorities of the means to maintain any power at all!
I do not say that such a fate is imminent at this time in any part of the world, but I am quite certain that another world war would bring about the necessary conditions for collapse and it would be only by a miracle that the collapse would not follow. And a world-wide collapse of administration would entail a disaster compared to which the decline and fall of Rome or of Persia or of Egypt would be but a passing shadow. For the past is ready to leap upon us again. The more modem we become, the nearer we are to a neolithic or even to a palæolithic existence.
A newly created civilization is near enough to its origins to realize and to understand the dangers that surround it. It looks back only a short distance of time and sees and remembers those primitive conditions from which it emerged so recently. And it knows how to avoid the dangers which it has so recently overcome. The first Greek cities were small and easily managed. Intercommunication and association into groups started almost before the cities were built. The sea became the vehicle of communication before the sites were chosen or the colonial enterprises planned. The Greeks, and the Romans after them, built up their civilization solidly and step by step. And so Greece and Rome have not wholly perished yet.
But the Minoans of Cnossus achieved a precocious city life before it was due. At the height of its power, Cnossus perhaps held a hundred thousand inhabitants. War was not feared, because there was no enemy in Crete and none on the high seas worth consideration. And so there were no fortifications at Cnossus and no coastal fortresses. When the enemy came, the whole complex of city life vanished overnight, for the Minoans seem to have been a complacent folk who ‘built as if they were to live forever.’
To-day, with armies millions strong and with vast fleets waiting patiently in their harbors for purposes and enemies as yet unidentified, we still sit complacently in our palaces and let events carry us along on the tide. Yet whither the tide is taking us we do not trouble to inquire.
This is not an exposition of the horrors of war; still less is it a pamphlet for pacificism. I am writing a simple prophetic archæological thesis. I am wondering what our proud cities will look like when curious scholars of a distant future come to collect the materials for the writing of a history of our times. I am enjoying the prospect of sitting on the edge of some furrow that was once East 60th Street or West 44th Street and wondering exactly how true a picture those future archæologists will paint, of the life that was once New York; how far they will be able to reconstruct that marvelous view which could once be seen from the middle of Queensborough Bridge. I am sitting on the top of a rough and high mound beneath which lie the tangled mechanism of Big Ben and the fragments of its brazen bells, and looking across the endless marshes to the North Sea, and I am wondering whether the precise and exquisite ‘Restored View of the Ancient City of London’ will bear any resemblance at all to the London that we know.
I am really inquiring into the capacity of scholarship to reconstruct the past. And if, in the process, I sound a little pessimistic, that need not worry us. For all the great cities of the world pass in due course, only we tend, like the citizens of every city at every age of time, to think that we are immortal, that our metropolitan Babylons will live forever and change gently from generation to generation, growing ever statelier, more magnificent, and more civilized. They may, indeed they may go on forever; but no city has done so as yet, and the present condition of the world suggests that there is little likelihood of a very long life for any capital town or for our particular mode of life.
Again, I insist, I speak purely as an archaeologist. I know nothing of social developments or of political necessities. But I do know for certain that a dozen empires have passed away and a hundred cities vanished in the few thousand years during which man has become Homo sapiens. Only when he becomes Homo sapientissimus will there be less risk of cities vanishing into dust and of nations bleeding to death for reasons obscure and uncertain. And that Homo sapientissimus has at last emerged I sec no hint or sign. On the contrary, at the moment there seems to have been a slight retrograde movement; man is Homo insipiens. We are hovering on the brink of a precipice, winding round that dizzy path up which we may ultimately reach the peaks of Wisdom, but off which we may so easily topple to destruction. Perhaps we shall meet others on the way, and, disputing the right of way, all fall over together. Perhaps we shall encounter friends who will help us to pull our burdens up the slope.
In any case, don’t let us sit primly in our chairs admiring the view up Fifth Avenue or down Regent Street. For in how short a time will that view be over rolling green hummocks and reedgrown wastes, with the sea or the river lapping at an empty shore!