From Pole to Pole | Page 3

its rails are fitted in exactly to the railway track on German soil. We hasten to take our seats in the carriages, for in a few minutes the German engine comes up and draws the train on to the land of Rügen.
The monotonous grind of iron on iron begins again, and the coast and the ferry-boat vanish behind us. Rügen lies as flat as a pancake on the Baltic Sea, and the train takes us through a landscape which reminds us of Sweden. Here grow pines and spruces, here peaceful roe-deer jump and roam about without showing the slightest fear of the noise of the engine and the drone of the carriages.
Another ferry takes us over the narrow sound which separates Rügen from the mainland, and we see through the window the towers and spires and closely-packed houses of Stralsund. Every inch of ground around us has once been Swedish. In this neighbourhood Gustavus Adolphus landed with his army, and in Stralsund Charles XII. passed a year of his adventurous life.
In the twilight the train carries us southwards through Pomerania, and before we reach Brandenburg the autumn evening has shrouded the North German lowland in darkness. The country is flat and monotonous; not a hill, hardly even an insignificant mound, rises above the level expanse. Yet the land has a peculiar attraction for the stranger from Sweden. He thinks of the time when Swedish gun-carriages splashed and dashed through the mud before the winter frost made their progress still more difficult and noisy. He thinks of heroic deeds and brave men, of early starts, and horses neighing with impatience at the reveille; of victories and honourable peaces, and of the captured flags at home.
If he is observant he will find many other remembrances in the North German low country. Boulders of Swedish granite lie scattered over the plain. They stand out like milestones and mark the limits of the extension of the Scandinavian inland ice. During a colder period of the world's history all northern Europe was covered with a coat of ice, and this period is called the Ice Age. No one knows why the ice embraced Scandinavia and the adjacent countries and swept in a broad stream over the Baltic Sea. And no one knows why the climate afterwards became warmer and drier, and forced the ice to melt away and gradually to leave the ground bare. But we know for a fact that the boulders in northern Germany were carried there on the back of an immense ice stream, for they are composed of rocks which occur only in Scandinavia. The ice tore them away from the solid mountains; during its slow movement southwards it carried them with it, and when it melted the blocks were left on the spot.
At last points of light begin to flash by like meteors in the night. They become more and more numerous, and finally come whole rows and clusters of electric lamps and lighted windows. We are passing through the suburbs of a huge city, one of the largest in the world and the third largest in Europe--Berlin.
BERLIN
If we spread out on the table a map of Europe on which all the railways are indicated by black lines, the map will look like a net with irregular meshes. At all the knots are towns, large centres of population which are in constant communication with one another by means of the railways. If we fix our eyes on North Germany, we see what looks like an enormous spider's web, and in the middle of it sits a huge spider. That spider is called Berlin. For as a spider catches its prey in an ingeniously spun net, so Berlin by its railways draws to itself life and movement not only from Germany but from all Europe--nay, from the whole world.
If we could fly some hundreds of miles straight up into the air and had such sharp eyes that we could perceive all the coasts and boundaries of Europe, and plainly distinguish the fine lines of the railways, we should also see small, dark, short forms running backwards and forwards along them. We should see, as it were, a teeming ant-hill, and after every ant we should see a small puff of smoke. In Scandinavia and Russia the bustle would seem less lively, but in the centre of Europe the ants would scurry about with terrible activity.
Whether it was winter or summer, day or night, the bustle would never grow less. From our elevated point of view we should see innumerable trains flying in the night like glow-worms in every direction. Ceaselessly they rush between cities and states, between the sea-coast and the inland districts, and to and from the heart of Europe. For during the last twenty years Berlin has become the