A fictional account of a walking tour along England's coast provides the narrator with a rich source for reflection on the country's history A fictional account of a walking tour through England's East Anglia, Sebald's home for more than twenty years, The Rings of Saturn explores Britain's pastoral and imperial past. Its ten strange and beautiful chapters, with their curious archive of photographs, consider dreams and reality. As the narrator walks, a company of ghosts keeps him company - Thomas Browne, Swinburne, Chateaubriand, Joseph Conrad, Borges - conductors between the past and present. The narrator meets lonely eccentrics inhabiting tumble-down mansions, and hears of the furious coastal battles of two world wars. He tells of far-off China and the introduction of the silk industry to Norwich. He walks to the now forsaken harbor where Conrad first set foot on English soil and visits the site of the once-great city of Dunwich, now sunk in the sea, where schools of herring swim. As the narrator catalogs the transmigration of whole worlds, the reader is mesmerized by change and oblivion, survival and memories. I In hospital -- Obituary -- Odyssey of Thomas Browne's skull -- Anatomy lecture -- Levitation -- Quincunx -- Fabled creatures -- Urn burial 1(26) II The diesel train -- Morton Peto's palace -- Visiting Somerleyton -- The cities of Germany in flames -- The decline of Lowestoft -- The former coastal resort -- Frederick Farrar and the court of King James II 27(22) III Fishermen on the beach -- The natural history of the herring -- George Wyndham Le Strange -- A great herd of swine -- The reduplication of man -- Orbis Tertius 49(24) IV The Battle of Sole Bay -- Nightfall -- Station Road in The Hague -- Mauritshuis -- Scheveningen -- The tomb of St Sebolt -- Schiphol airport -- The invisibility of man -- The Sailors' Reading Room -- Pictures from the Great War -- The concentration camp at Jasenovac on the Sava 73(28) V Conrad and Casement -- The Boy Teodor -- Exile in Volgda -- Nowofastow -- Death and interment of Apollo Korzensiowski -- Sea -- and love-life -- A winter journey -- The heart of darkness -- The panorama of Waterloo -- Casement, the slave economy and the Irish question -- Casement tried and executed for treason 101(34) VI The bridge over the Blyth -- The Chinese court train -- The Taiping rebellion and the opening of China -- Destruction of the garden of Yuan Ming Yuan -- The end of Emperor Hsien-feng -- The Dowager Empress Tz'u-hsi -- Mysteries of power -- The town beneath the sea -- Poor Algernon 135(32) VII Dunwich heath -- Marsh Acres, Middleton -- A Berlin childhood -- Exile in England -- Dreams, elective affinities, correspondences -- Two strange stories -- Through the rainforest 167(24) VIII A conversation about sugar -- Boulge Park -- The FitzGeralds -- The Bredfield nursery -- Edward FitzGerald's literary ventures -- A Magic Shadow -- Show -- Loss of a friend -- Year's end -- Last journey, summer landscape, tears of happiness -- A game of dominoes -- An Irish memory -- On the history of the civil war -- Arson, impoverishment and decline -- Catherine of Siena -- The entrepreneurial spirit and the cult of the pheasant -- Through the desert -- Secret weapons of destruction -- In another country another country 191(48) IX The Temple of Jerusalem -- Charlotte Ives and the Vicomte de Chateaubriand -- Memoirs from beyond the grave -- In Ditchingham churchyard -- Ditchingham Park -- The hurricane of 16th October, 1987 239(30) X Thomas Browne's Musaeum Clausum -- The silkworm moth, Bombyx mori -- Origins and spread of sericulture -- The Norwich silk-weavers -- The melancholy of the weavers -- Pattern books: nature and art -- Sericulture in Germany -- The extermination business -- Mourning silk