The town of Rheinfelden was now in view, and I began to wonder how the English four-oar boat we had traced as far as Lauffenburg could have managed to descend the rapids just now passed. But I learned afterwards that the four-oar had come there in a time of flood, when rocks would be covered, and probably with only such eddies as I have already noticed higher up the river where it was deep. So they pulled on bravely to Bâle, where the hotel folks mentioned that when the five moist Britons arrived their clothes and baggage were all drenched, and the waiter said, with a malicious grin, that thereby his friend the washerwoman had earned twenty-seven francs in one night.
On the left bank of the river was a large building with a smooth gravel shore in front, to which I steered at once. This was the great salt-water baths of Rheinfelden--a favourite resort for crippled invalids. The salt rock in the earth beneath impregnates the springs with such an intensity of brine that eighty per cent. of fresh water has to be added before the saline mixture can be medicinally employed as a bath. If you take a glass of the water as it proceeds from the spring, and put a little salt in it, the salt will not dissolve, the water is already saturated. A drop of it put on your coat speedily dries up and leaves a white stain of minute crystals. In fact, this water seemed to me to be far more saline than even the water of the Dead Sea, which is in all conscience salt enough, as every one knows who has rubbed it on his face in that reeking-hot death-stricken valley of Jericho.
Though the shore was pleasant here and the water was calm, I found no one to welcome me now, and yet this was the only time I had reason to expect somebody to greet the arrival of the canoe. For in the morning a worthy German had told me he was going by train to Rheinfelden, and he would keep a look out for the canoe, and would surely meet me on the beach if I "ever got through the rapids." But I found afterwards that he _had_ come there, and with his friends, too, and they had waited and waited till at last they gave up the Rob Roy as a "missing ship." Excellent man, he must have had some novel excuses to comfort his friends with as they retired, disappointed, after waiting in vain!