Mudlarking

That the surface remained clean was no great surprise: stuff simply fell down between the rushes, out of sight, smell and mind. We never noticed any odour or muck the whole time we were there. But when I came to clean it all out at the end I had expected there to be gunge at the bottom. There wasn’t. It was clean and sweet-smelling, free of both in

The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which

In a chill hour they came to the end of the water-course. The banks became moss-grown mounds. Over the last shelf of rotting stone the stream gurgled and fell down into a brown bog and was lost. Dry reeds hissed and rattled though they could feel no wind.

In contrast to the view of many people today, water was not perceived as a barrier to communication and transport but rather as a means of facilitating it. Island and coastal communities would not have been considered remote and inaccessible, but instead as being closely connected to each other through an extensive network of maritime routes. A key