Cambray

“ I now hasten to continue the narrative of our route from Laon to Cambray, which was a day's journey. The road for the first stage presented us with a welcome variety of landscape, hills, dales, copses, shady villages, and fertile fields. Never did we see such a profusion of fine apples as were growing here, on each side of the way. The peasants were gathering them as we passed, and heaps of this rosy, tempting fruit were piled up in hillocks beneath the trees from which they had just been taken. ”

“ The man to whom you owe your life, your future, the honour of your name, asks nothing more of your gratitude. But I, who am privileged to read in his heart, know that it is in my power to repay him in full for all that he hath done. And yet you hesitate! I am content to make appeal to the people of Cambray. But I know too what goes on in your minds. Ye think that ye are pledged to Monsieur Duc d'Anjou! that Jacqueline de Broyart, if she refuse to wed him, would sully your honour and, what were infinitely worse, would besmirch the fair fame of Flanders. ”

“ Ten on each ladder, which makes fifty all told, and they the flower of the Duke of Parma's troops. Up they swarm like human ants striving to reach a hillock. Now the gunners have to cease firing, lest they hit those ladders with their human freight.
And while at the breach the men of Cambray make their last desperate stand, the first of the Spanish pikemen has reached the topmost rung of his ladder. The human ants have come to the top of their hillock. Already the foremost amongst them has begun to hoist himself up, with his hands clinging to the uneven masonry. ”

“ The walls of Cambray are crumbling, but her citizens are steadfast. Halbertmen and pikemen, archers and gunners, they all have a moment's weakness to retrieve, and do it with deeds of indomitable valour. And as they fall, and their numbers become thinned, as that breathing, palpitating wall sustains shock after shock of the most powerful engines of warfare the world has ever known, its gaps are made good by other breasts and other hearts, and with all the spirit which will not rest until it has conquered. ”

“ Subsequent formations of Cambrian age came in a great group of alternating shale and sandstone followed by an immense thickness of limestone and shale. Fossils of Cambrian age, mainly Olenellus, are found as far down as the middle of the sandstone group. The strata lying beneath the fossiliferous beds differ in no material respect from those overlying. All are plainly due to the same causes and form part of one and the same group, and all are closely associated in area and structure. ”

“ The great series of Cambrian and pre-Cambrian strata in eastern North America from Alabama to Labrador; in western North America from Nevada and California far into Alberta and British Columbia, and also in China, [2] have been studied and searched for evidences of life until the conclusion has gradually been forced upon me that on the North American Continent we have no known pre-Cambrian marine deposits containing traces of organic remains, and that the abrupt appearance of the Cambrian fauna results from geological and not from biotic conditions. ”

“ And, as if in mockery, a mirage, born of those bitter tears, hovers on the horizon as the hot sun breeds an invisible vapour from which arise distant cities and a labyrinth of smooth lagoons that shimmer alluringly across the white solitude.
Such is the Camargue. The description, however, applies in strictness to the summer season. In winter the salt with which the ground is saturated is not visible; there is only a moist oozy-looking soil, growing reeds and stunted bushes. ”

“ The lamentable ruin of once beautiful Arras, the desolation of Douai, and the villages between it and Valenciennes, the wanton destruction of what was once the heart of Cambrai, and that grim scene of the broken bridge on the Cambrai—Bapaume road, over the Canal du Nord, where we got out on a sombre afternoon, to look and look again at a landscape that will be famous through the world for generations: they rise again, with the sharpness of no ordinary recollection, on the inward vision. ”

“ Strips of Cambrian formations occupy troughs in the pre-Cambrian rocks of New England and the maritime provinces of Canada; a long belt borders on the west the crystalline rocks of the Blue Ridge; and on the opposite side of the continent the Cambrian reappears in the mountains of the Great Basin and the Canadian Rockies. In the Mississippi valley it is exposed in small districts where uplift has permitted the stripping off of younger rocks. Although the areas of outcrop are small, we may infer that Cambrian rocks were widely deposited over the continent of North America. ”

“ During the Cambrian period the land subsided again, perhaps because of the weight of the uplifted sedimentary formations. During this subsidence the waters once again covered vast portions of North America, and additional muds and slimes were deposited on the bottom. It was at this period that life first appeared on the earth, in the form of simple marine organisms which have left fossil remains. These deposits made in the Cambrian period can be seen in outcroppings all through the region, although they are most notably found in the area about Deadwood. ”

“ From this ledge opened cracks and fissures under the roof, suggesting in the dim light infinite possibilities in the way of hiding-places. Besides these, a wide stretch of sand at the upper end of the chamber, which was bare at low tide, invited exploration. At high water the sea flooded the cavern to its farthest extremity and beat upon the walls. Then there was a great surge and roar of waters through the passage from mouth to mouth, and at turn of tide—in hopeful agreement with the legend—the suck and commotion of a whirlpool, almost, as the sea drew back its waves. ”

“ Almost Strong Arm evolved an idea, an idea that tubers (or potatoes) planted in the earth in the sun, and left for a whole tribe of suns, might in some mysterious manner beyond his understanding become the mother of many potatoes.
Then the Hairy Folk descended from the ridge, upon the Cave People. They came with long spears in their hands and cries of death in their fuzzy throats, and Strong Arm and the Cave People gave them to battle. Many were killed and Big Foot roasted the body of one of the enemy upon the coals and the Cave People ate the Hairy Man with much zest and relish. ”

“ In this Camargue everything is strange. There are ponds like the huge central pond, the Vaccarès, in the [Pg 15] centre of which one can wade with ease; there are tracts of land where the pedestrian sinks out of sight and is drowned. Here deception is easy. Yonder green slime that you take for a level plain—beware!—men are drowned therein; those vast stretches of water which seem to you small seas—return that way to-morrow; they will have evaporated, leaving only a mirror of white salt that crackles beneath your feet. Yonder, do you see the calm, deep water? ”

“ The life of the Cambrian, though not so rich as in the succeeding Silurian period, nevertheless consists of representatives of most of the great classes of invertebrate animals. The coarse sandy deposits of the formation, which abound more particularly towards its lower part, naturally are to a large extent barren of fossils; but the muddy sediments, when not too highly cleaved, and especially towards the summit of the group, are replete with organic remains. ”

“ It is true that in the Cambrian formation—the earliest series of sediments in which fossils are abundant—we find numerous groups, some very low, others very high, in the zoological scale, which appear to have simultaneously flashed into existence. For reasons stated above, however, we cannot accept this appearance as real; and we must believe that many of the Cambrian groups of animals really came into being long before the commencement of the Cambrian period. ”

“ And though the progress of modern discovery has done much to lower the wonder, by rendering it merely one of thousands of the same class—for even among the cliffs of the hill in which the cavern is perforated, there is scarcely a spring that has not its border of coral-like petrifactions, and its moss and grass and nettle-stalks of marble—the Dropping-Cave may well be regarded as a curiosity still. It is hollowed, a few feet over the beach, in the face of one of the low precipices which skirt the entrance of the bay. ”

“ In the oldest portion of the Cambrian series in Wales, Hicks has catalogued species of no less than seventeen genera, embracing Crustaceans, the representatives of our crabs and lobsters, bivalve and univalve shell-fishes of different types, worms, sea-stars, zoophytes, and sponges. If we could have walked on the shores of the old Cambrian sea, or cast our dredge or trawl into its depths, we should have found representatives of most of the humbler forms of sea life still extant,46 though of specific forms strange to us. ”

“ The trunk of the tree made a kind of boat the Cave People had never seen, for only the burned out portion at the end lay open and dipped into the waters. In the hollow they lay for a long time, till their strength returned and their fears fell. Then they sat up and looked about.
The rains had ceased and the sun made his way high in the heavens, and they were borne swiftly along in the great log. Often they crashed into the branches of trees that rose just above the water. But always Strong Arm, Quack Quack and Laughing Boy clung tightly. ”

“ Formation and locality.—Middle Cambrian: Stephen formation, Ogygopsis shale, west slope of ridge between Mount Field and Mount Wapta, about 3800 feet above Field on the line of the Canadian Pacific Railway, British Columbia, Canada.
A second species of this genus or a closely allied form occurs in the Redlichia chinensis zone of Indo-China. (See p. 19.) It is the oldest Merostome now known as it comes from the horizon of the Man-t'o shale formation of the upper Lower Cambrian terrane. [13] ”

“ The traces of life in the Laurentian period, as we have seen, are but scanty; but the Cambrian Rocks—so called from their occurrence in North Wales and its borders ("Cambria ") —have yielded numerous remains of animals and some dubious plants. The Cambrian deposits have thus a special interest as being the oldest rocks in which occur any number of well-preserved and unquestionable organisms. We have here the remains of the first fauna, or assemblage of animals, of which we have at present knowledge. ”

“ Probably nowhere in the world is to be seen a spot so desolate and so wretched. The village is planted at the extreme west angle of the Camargue. It can be reached by one road only, rough to travel over, and impracticable in winter. This road leaves Arles, or rather Trinquetailles, opposite Arles, traverses the marsh of the Grand Mar, follows the dyke of the river, and then threads its way among morasses, and over soil white with salt, and burning under the rays of the sun. ”

“ Your geography book tells you that Cambrai gave its name to the fine linen or muslin which was first made in the fifteenth century, and is known as cambric. Le Cateau has important woollen and merino spinning-mills, and figures in British history as the place where peace was signed between England, France, and Spain in the second year of Queen Elizabeth's reign. The proposed British lines extended from Cambrai through Le Cateau to Landrecies, [50] on the Sambre. Landrecies is famous as the birthplace of Dupleix, [51] who founded French power in India. ”

“ In this age new land rose above the ocean. The waters were still warm, and the atmosphere was hazy and full of moisture, hot, but without clear sunlight. The animals were corals and crabs; the vegetables were sea-weeds. The rocks of the Cambrian are chiefly sandstone and slate, and we find the fossils not scattered through all the rocks, but in layers, so that some ledges of rock are nearly destitute of organic remains, and then come others crowded with fossils of animals and vegetables. ”

“ Strong Arm, Quack Quack and little Laughing Boy were among these. With the Foolish One and the Hairy Man they lived in the great banyan until the river crept back into its old channel. Then they descended upon the earth once more and began their long journey toward the Hollow, 96where they had lived with a small group of Cave Dwellers, the people of their own tribe.
All the face of the world seemed covered with a layer of rich mud, deposited by the river. The sun grew warmer with every day and a hot steam arose continually from the earth. ”

“ He was nearer the eastern set of cliffs; on the occasion of his first vision the sun was rising over them, and black against the sunlight and pale against their shadow appeared a multitude of soaring forms that Mr Cave regarded as birds. A vast range of buildings spread below him; he seemed to be looking down upon them; and as they approached the blurred and refracted edge of the picture they became indistinct. There were also trees curious in shape, and in colouring a deep mossy green and an exquisite gray, beside a wide and shining canal. ”

“ What must strike all observers at the outset is, that caverns vary greatly both in their character and in their dimensions; some being long and sinuous, in places contracting into narrow pas- sages, and then again expanding into halls more or less vast; while others are merely vaulted recesses in the face of a rock, or even long grooves running along the face of some almost perpendicular though inland cliff. Most of the English ossiferous caverns belong to the former class, while the majority of those of the Dordogne and some other parts of the south of France belong to the latter. ”

“ The strata in which it occurs were deposited in a depression opening out toward the Pacific ocean, where southwestern California is now located; this depression soon extended northward and presumably connected through to British Columbia and Alberta, as the same species of Olenellus occur in the central and upper portions of the Lower Cambrian both in Nevada and Alberta.
I do not know of a Cambrian fauna as old as that of Nevadia wecksi on the eastern side of the continent, or on the European continent. ”