A couple of months ago someone at the lake said to me, “My wife and I have decided that the water isn’t going down any further because it’s reached the water table.” Something in the way he said it made me sceptical. And, anyway, I try not for explanations but for portraying. And so, in the meantime, though I have gone away and come back again, the lake, it must be said, has not dried out completely, though hot dry weather has persisted. And when it has rained new puddles have formed, but they too have not dried out during further hot dry weather that followed. So, without reaching for an explanation (perhaps failing), but reaching through portrayal, which my shoreline colleagues have somehow added to, we might well be forced to say that we are not looking so much at the drying water of the lake sucking itself away; but rather the breathing of the water level of the whole area—the so-called water table. If so, it is less a case of something drying from the outside in (or topside down), but rather something rising and falling from the inside out (or underside up).