Читать книгу The End of the World - Geoffrey Dennis - Страница 6

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Not fire but flood.

Less patron’d by the generations of old, this mode has in revenge had greater dominion over more modern expectation.

In first result, Comet and Fire might be watery ends. A comet could pull up the deeps, and flood before it poisoned or struck. Increased heat could drown ere it had time to scorch: at the first touch of the sun grown mightier the mountain snows would melt with terrible speed, would pour down in myriad converging streams from all high places into all low; from the Alps into the over-civilized European lowlands, into Italy, Germany, France; from the Himalayas into the over-peopled Ganges plains, torrenting from Everest to Comorin; from the African heights into the black jungles south and west, and northward into Egypt, which would see rise up the River, swallowing the Cairene delta and the oldest seats of fear; from the Rockies into the proud Yankee prairies, the twentieth century’s chief seat of expected power; from the Andes into the Latinate pampas, perhaps, unless the end comes earlier, to be the chief seat of the twenty-first’s. All men that had not perished of the sun’s rays would be devoured by the sun-driven waters. Not with hope could they lift up their eyes to the hills, for from the mountains of prey their doom would be triumphing down. Vainly they cling for a few poor days or hours to refuges near them, the swiftest or craftiest climbing to cathedral towers, Milan or Cologne or Chartres, to pagoda or temple tops, to the peaks of the Pyramids, to Woolworth’s seven-and-fiftieth, or such Argentine monster as may yet outbuild it. In white-faced terror of drowning, vainly they climb: the waters increase and prevail, and quench the last cry.

Which flood through heat should be classed, if with scant comfort for its victims, as a mere incidental water-end. The aqueous future proper that, confirming some ancient beliefs, some modern geologists foretell is the less spectacular one of the slow conquest of the world’s land by the world’s sea, the gradual covering of the earth by the waters of the great deep. The erosionists clasp Noah’s Ark.

Whether the Bible Deluge ever took place is matter of combat and conjecture. Great inundations all agree there must have been; whether one of these was not merely widespread but almost universal, and whether not almost universal but quite, forms the subject of a whole literature and is still an unsettled controversy, even among anti-inspirationists themselves and those most anxious to prove all old tales old wives’ tales. Some geologists discern in the past—as some others in the future also—a time of worldwide volcanic eruptions and upheaval of mountain chains, accompanied by subsidences of land and followed by great waves of translation that traversed the tumbled continents and engulphed the antediluvian animals with antediluvian man. What of Cythera? The upward-fleeing skeletons from base to peak, seeking vain safety from the waters behind and upon them? What of the Mountain of Bones?

How the Flood began and proceeded: how the windows of heaven were opened and all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, how the waters increased, how they prevailed, how they prevailed exceedingly upon the earth, fifteen cubits upwards did the waters prevail, and how all the high hills that were under the whole heaven were covered, with only Noah remaining alive and they that were with him in the ark, all this is known to every child in Christendom: the Bible tells him. How in the pagan variant it was Jupiter and not Jehovah who sent forth the rain-bringing South wind and summoned the sea, till the dolphins played among the forest-tops and the wolves swam among the sheep and only Parnassus tip was left and only Deucalion son of Prometheus and Pyrrha daughter of Pandora were saved in their boat, is known to every child of the classics: Apollodorus informs us. How in the Chaldæan stories, Hasisadra (or Xisathros), warned by Ea (or Kronos), took into the ark with him not only couples of the domestic animals but also a couple of domestic servants, one male and one female, both butler and bondswoman, so that that useful species also might be perpetuated, along with a few “intimate friends” and Buzurkugel, the trained steersman, is familiar to Orientalists: who have the tablets that Asshur-banipal ordered, and Berosius’ exciting narrative. How the Red Indians remembered it, as in the story Snapping Turtle told his paleface questioner, we know from beloved Catlin. How the Celestial flood was worldwide like the Pentateuchal, and how Yü proved himself every inch a Noah, stands written in Shu King, in the oldest of literatures. How, finally, in almost all peoples’ traditions the event is there, though the details may differ oddly, and what those details are, is known to comparative folklore students and diluvian specialists alone.

The races without any flood record are few: only the Negroes, the Japanese and the Egyptians. There is a theory that the last-named once had the legend, but deliberately forgot it or changed it. For them the rising of waters was their wealth, their life, their hope; that one flood they knew, yearly, Nilotic, was the best thing they knew. Flood as disaster they could not conceive of; any such legend must be a false legend.

Despite this almost universal tradition, no quiet universal deluge may ever have taken place. Local disasters may have been magnified by memory and myth into general ones.

The Shu King account is indeed partly founded on fact; for in the twenty-fourth century before Jesus the Hwang-Ho, Yellow River, Sorrow of China, had historically risen and ruined half the land. Half the land though, not half the world. Then the Noachian story. The animals went in two by two. Did they, forsooth! What ablest zoo-keeper from Hamburg or Regent’s Park could pretend that with a total staff of seven—wife, three sons, and three sons’ wives—to help him he could have managed that multitudinous procession of all the beasts of the field and fowls of the air, the dinosaurs and the donkeys, the iguanodons and the humming-birds, the moths and the behemoths, not to consider the quantity and diversity of the fodder to be collected and stored, and the cage (or cabin) arrangements, and the cleaning?

Yet, when every little Victorian laugh has been re-laughed, the strangely widespread character of the story must be allowed to count for much, supported as it is by evidence ranging from the state of the mammoth fossils in Siberia, and the position of bones in countless cave recesses, far apart, where only water could have carried them, and the grouping of those bones, men’s and hyænas’ side by side, who would never have laired together, and their tumultuous arrangement and their diluvial coating, to the Great Thaw that followed the last ice age, the newer theories of continent-tumblings and continent-floodings, and the very latest and smartest deductions from radioactivity and isostasy.

Naturally the old stories show discrepancies on this point or that: some, like the Persian account, giving a volcanic origin—it was the fiery dragon from the South—some alleging a pluvial cause, some others a pelagian, and the Welsh legend and the Mexican casting their respective heroes, Dwyfan and Dwyfach the double steersman, and Cox-Cox the steersman with so apt a double name, for quite different rôles from those that Berosius or Moses cast for theirs. Discrepancies of elaboration or elucidation, that do but push the main facts into bolder relief. What other cosmological myth carries such conviction, seems to rest so imperiously upon bedrock of truth?

The flood-fearers had one advantage over the flame-fearers; they had precedents for protecting themselves—and knew how to. It was easier, moreover, to be armed against water than against fire; Man saw that he could not salamandrize the whole surface of the earth, turn it into one vast asbestos ark; but he could make himself arks of gopher wood, watertight, seaworthy—and he did. Sporadically throughout the Middle Ages that strange shipbuilding went on, one famous exponent being good Doctor Auriol of Toulouse, cleric and don, who, when the German astrologer Stoffler foretold the Final Deluge for 1524, built an ark large enough not only for himself and all his family but—most unselfishly, and setting a much-needed retrospective example to Deukalion and Noah—for all his friends as well. The waters never came, St. Swithin failed him, but the doctor had at least the satisfaction (in addition to joy of knighthood, royal payment for the long harangue of welcome he delivered to Francis the First when that monarch visited the town) of being prepared and forearmed. More solid satisfactions had those who, believing Stoffler not, acquired at job-lot prices the seaside and riverside property of those believing.

Whatever our beliefs about such beliefs, that man held them, that he believed the Flood had happened, is what matters here; and believed it might happen again, and next time spare no Noah. For if fire-end has held pride of place, flood-end has never lacked supporters: Parthians, Persians, some Peruvians. Watery Amos counters fiery Isaiah. The burden of the desert of the sea: it shall rise up wholly like the River. Nor were the two contradictory. Under the Cyclic Theory of ever-repeated destruction, ever-recurring re-birth and re-death of the world, water and fire alternate; the conflagratio breaks out in the great summer of the Magnus Annus of disaster, the diluvium mounts in the great winter.

For centuries, however, the flood-fear halted until, during the nineteenth, it was given new life by certain geologists.

Gradually, through long ages, the continents will become level. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low. Then, there being more water than land—enough of the former to cover the latter all over and have two inches to spare—the land must finally vanish. We shall drown.

This, unless some other agency should get in first—this will and must happen.

It is happening now. A usual estimate of the world area lost by land to sea is some ten or eleven square miles a year.

The loss is not evenly distributed over the globe; for, if others lose, some countries actually gain against the sea. Where was half Holland a thousand years ago? Where is Atlantis now?

Nor evenly distributed through the divers parts of any one country. For instance Italy; where, if in many an eroded republican corner the sea is victor, she draws back defeated near east-imperial Ravenna and west-imperial Rome, victorious Rome. Or England; where, though the west coast on the whole is a winner, the east coast loses much more. If, as commercial enemies allege, at Southport the sea view is now telescopic only, the once crown of Lancastrian resorts can console herself by remembering that across the Pennines, on the rival White Rose coast (on a dead straight line to the tiniest fraction of latitude), Ravenspur, where Henry the Fourth once landed to claim that other Lancastrian crown, is now a sepulchred city far out beneath the invading sea.

But, for the whole world, the loss is always larger than the gain; the net adverse balance being those ten or eleven square miles a year. Take the mileage of the five continents, and find out how long we have.

If some natural forces work the other way—with some human ones, English training-walls, Dutch dikes—at best they retard a little the end. The Sea is stronger. Time is with her. She has more, and more powerful, allies. All the forces of nature are her allies.

The sun. He heats the rocks by day, but not by night; they expand, they diminish; their texture is weakened. He scorches the surface, but not the inner parts; their texture is made uneven. Soaked by rain, he over-rapidly dries them. They lose their molecular cohesion. They crumble. They fall down into the sea.

The rain. It co-operates with the sun—allies all—wetting, weakening, dissolving, oxydizing, rotting, rusting. It gets into the cracks the sun has made; where, in winter changed into snow, it wedgewise cleaves asunder the rocks, made thus yet weaker for the sun’s further action and still readier for the sea.

The rivers. They wear away their channels and bear downward in their muddied waters granite and lime and sand, our stolen foothold and heritage; downward always, denudationally, to the sea.

The beasts. In their castings the earthworm and the white ant bring up, moles and rabbits burrow up, annual mountain immensities of under-earth to the surface; made loose, comminuted, prompt to be blown away by the wind or carried by raindrops to the rivers, and so at last, these also, to the sea.

Glaciers assist; ice-meteors clash in the air; the force of gravity solemnly pulls its weight. While the wind, from the shore carrying light particles seaward, from the sea beating against the loosened rocks with fierce loose grains of sand, makes Æolian erosion not the least of the many forces working to disinherit us and to drown.

Last, and victorious, mother of terror, man’s first home and final enemy, there is the Sea herself, mightier than all these her helpers. She abates not, nor assuages. Against the world’s two hundred thousand miles of coastline she wars unceasingly; she batters with stone and shingle, with her tides and her currents, her unseen salts and her seen white tempests; she beats, she eats; she crashes, she corrodes. At long last she will have us; the ultimate land for man’s feet will be swallowed; the waters shall cover the earth.