Читать книгу The Great Galveston Disaster - Paul Lester - Страница 81

Table of Contents

The tidal wave along the Texan coast will rank among the most disastrous in history. History is deficient in the record of such tragedies in human life, but the records are written in physical geography, and are found in the conformation of shore lines, here and there, around all the continents. It is impossible to estimate the number of lives lost through inundations since mankind began, for purposes of commercial intercourse, the development of seaports. Doubtless the total would run into the hundreds of thousands, and might reach into millions.

Geology is quite sure that the rough Norwegian coast, pierced at intervals of every few miles with the fiords or estuaries which penetrate in many instances leagues into the land, tell the story of many cataclysms such as that which has just occurred along the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Science, however, taking no note of the traditions or folklore of a people, antedates all human life on the Scandinavian peninsula in setting the time when this great rising of the sea against the land took place.

Scientists are agreed on putting the formation of the Norwegian shore lines as far back as the glacial period. But in the songs of the skalds, as late as the reign of Harold Hardrada, there are allusions to the valor of olden heroes over whom the seas had swept, but whose spirits rode upon the winds which blew the Norman galleys to other shores. In the Norway of the present day there are traditions, handed down through countless generations, from the remotest antiquity, telling how, but not when, the seas came in.