From the day they
first followed the retreating ice-cap round the North Cape, down
to the present moment, their problem was the same.
The new Teufelsdrockh, though considerably older than the old
one, saw no clearer into past or future, but he was fully as much
perplexed. From the archaic ice-barrier to the Caspian Sea, a
long line of division, permanent since ice and inertia first took
possession, divided his lines of force, with no relation to
climate or geography or soil.
The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for
he will not expect himself to explain ignorance. A century ago he
carried letters and sought knowledge; to-day he knows that no one
knows; he needs too much and ignorance is learning. He wandered
south again, and came out at Kiel, Hamburg, Bremen, and Cologne.
A mere glance showed him that here was a Germany new to mankind.
Hamburg was almost as American as St. Louis. In forty years, the
green rusticity of Dusseldorf had taken on the sooty grime of
Birmingham. The Rhine in 1900 resembled the Rhine of 1858 much as
it resembled the Rhine of the Salic Franks. Cologne was a railway
centre that had completed its cathedral which bore an absent-
minded air of a cathedral of Chicago. The thirteenth century,
carefully strained-off, catalogued, and locked up, was visible to
tourists as a kind of Neanderthal, cave-dwelling, curiosity.
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