Terra incognita

“ HOW THE MOUNTAINS WERE UPHEAVED. The notion that the ground is naturally steadfast is an error,—an error which arises from the incapacity of our senses to appreciate any but the most palpable, and at the same time most exceptional, of its movements. The idea of terra firma belongs with the ancient belief that the earth was the centre of the universe. It is, indeed, by their mobility that the continents survive the increasing assaults of the ocean waves, and the continuous down-wearing which the rivers and glaciers bring about.—Professor Shaler. ”

“ Finally, what grave problems does the Desert place before the man of science! And first, why do life and fertility prevail elsewhere,—here, sterility and death? Why does an irrevocable curse seem to weigh upon certain parts of the world, while others rejoice in Nature’s fairest gifts? It is by examining the constitution of the soil and the character of the climate that we discover the key to this enigma, and recognize in this apparent anomaly a necessary effect of the harmonious laws of the universe. ”

“ There may be, right here and now, passing through us and this world, some planet invisible to us, with mountains, oceans, lakes, rivers, cities, and inhabitants: and yet we know absolutely nothing of their existence. ”

“ And all this time I saw no sign of life, not even a spoor in the sand to show that mankind had ever trod there. There was no animal life even; a few birds, and a few snakes, nothing more indeed so deserted and dead was this weird land that it appeared unreal, and often I imagined that by some strange chance I had been transported to some other and long-dead planet, so little was this maze of craters like Mother Earth. ”

“ The stream is still quiet, and we glide along through a strange, wierd, grand region. The landscape everywhere, away from the river, is of rock—cliffs of rock; tables of rock; plateaus of rock; terraces of rock; crags of rock—ten thousand strangely carved forms. Rocks everywhere and no vegetation; no soil; no sand. In long gentle curves the river winds about these rocks. When speaking of these we must not conceive of piles of bowlders, or heaps of fragments, but a whole land of naked rock, with giant forms carved on it: cathedral-shaped buttes, towering hundreds or thousands of feet ”

“ But their succession has been broken up by frequent and violent alterations in the configuration of the globe. Land and water have changed their level,—islands have been transformed to continents,—sea-bottoms have become dry land, and dry land has sunk to form sea-bottoms,—Alps and Himalayas, Pyrenees and Apennines, Alleghanies and Rocky Mountains, have had their stormy birthdays since many of these beds have been piled one above another, and there are but few spots on the earth's surface where any number of them may be found in their original order and natural position. ”

“ Creator, to fill all places with living things. To say nothing of the vast intervals between planet and planet, which, it is presumed, no one supposes to be occupied by living things; how large a portion of the surface of the earth is uninhabited, or inhabited only in the scantiest manner. Vast desert tracts exist in Africa and in Asia, where the barren sand nourishes neither animal nor vegetable life. The highest regions of mountain-ranges, clothed with perpetual snow, and with far-reaching sheets of glacier ice, are untenanted, except by the chamois at their outskirts. ”

“ There, remote from human habitation, the geologist sees as it were two conditions of the world,—the one, the shattered framework and fragments of its early convulsions, huge mountains prostrate and crumbling beneath his feet,—and the other, the spring-heads of renewed vitality collecting in countless dripping rills, each to sustain its own little plot of pasturage and flowerets, not the less welcome that they are all so rare and alpine, and looking in their freshness as if they were there purposely to cicatrize and heal up the deep scars in the rugged precipices around. ”

“ His obedient Afreets toiled on, denuding the plateaux of their soil, washing it away from every slope and peak, pouring it year by year into the cañons, and whirling it on to the ocean. The rivers, the brooklets, the springs, and the rains all joined in this eternal robbery. Little by little an eighth of a continent was stripped of its loam, its forests, its grasses, its flowers, its vegetation of every species. What had been a land of fertility became an arid and rocky desert. ”

“ For many thousand years, with occasional warmer spells, that vast ice-sheet brooded, silent and grim, over the face of the two continents. Life was extinct as far south as the latitude of New York and London. No plant or animal survived the general freezing. Not a creature broke the monotony of that endless glacial desert. ”

“ And thus, in what may seem to us sublime antagonism, land is ever rising in the domain of ocean, and ocean ever encroaching on the regions of land. No sooner does a new island, or mountain peak, or wide area of continent, appear above the waves, than the abrading agencies are at work again. Rain, air, frost, rivers, currents, breakers, all begin anew the process of destruction, and cease not until the land has utterly disappeared, and its worn debris has sunk in mid-ocean to be in process of time once more dry land, and suffer another slow process of obliteration. ”

“ The forest tree endures for its centuries and then decays; the mountains crumble and change, and perhaps subside in some convulsion of nature; the sea retires, and the shore ceases to resound with the “everlasting” voice of the ocean: such reflections have already crowded upon the mind of the geologist; and it now appears that the courses of the heavens themselves are not exempt from the universal law of decay; that not only the rocks and the mountains, but the sun and the moon have the sentence “to end” stamped upon their foreheads. They enjoy no privilege beyond man except a longer respite. ”

“ Far above and on all sides I see nothing but fragments of rocks. For centuries, wind, frost, rain and snow have been hard at work leveling the mountains. They have broken up the hard masses of yellowish white trachyte, and the dikes of black basalt into small pieces—some as minute as walnuts, but most of them much larger, with sharp-pointed edges that cut my feet. Across these vast fields the wild sheep, thinking nothing of jumping and gamboling over such steep slopes of broken stones, have made trails that cross and criss-cross everywhere. ”

“ How strange, I thought, that this sphere should be thus condemned to solitude! I had hoped, at least, to discover some new form of animal life, perhaps of a lower class than any with which we are at present acquainted, but still some living organism. I found my newly discovered world, if I may so speak, a beautiful chromatic desert.
While I was speculating on the singular arrangements of the internal economy of Nature, with which she so frequently splinters into atoms our most compact theories, I thought I beheld a form moving slowly through the glades of one of the prismatic forests. ”

“ Every one must have remarked how mud-banks, left by the retiring tide, imitate in miniature a country with hill and dale; and here we have the original model in rock, formed as the continent rose during the secular retirement of the ocean, instead of during the ebbing and flowing of the tides. If a shower of rain falls on the mud-bank, when left dry, it deepens the already-formed shallow lines of excavation; and so is it with the rain of successive centuries on the bank of rock and soil, which we call a continent. ”

“ In this sterile domain, this borderland of phantasy and reality, nature is so distraught that the supernatural seems to hold carnival, and in the forms which we here behold there is constant suggestion of chaos. The earth is parched to sterility, and yet there are abundant evidences that in centuries long ago this same land was abundantly blessed with an amazing fertility. Depressions ramifying the region are the dry beds of what were once water-courses, and the whole plateau is garish with rocks over which life-giving floods once poured their vivifying nourishment. ”

“ And thus the uniformitarian is led to consider the facts which geology brings to light, as indicating a slow and almost imperceptible, but, upon the whole, constant series of changes, not only in the position of the earth's materials, but in its animal and vegetable population. Land becomes sea and sea becomes land; the beds of oceans are elevated into mountain regions, carrying with them the remains of their inhabitants; sheets of lava pour from volcanic vents and overwhelm the seats of life ”

“ But even if that were so—if at long intervals the world for some hours in its cosmical year was chilled and frozen in an insignificant cap at either extremity—these casual episodes in a long story do not interfere with the general truth of the principle that life as a whole during the greater portion of its antique existence has been carried on under essentially tropical conditions. No matter what geological formation we examine, we find everywhere the same tale unfolded in plain inscriptions before our eyes. ”

“ Can the actual state of the earth be considered as definitive? The revolutions which have fashioned its surface, and produced the Alps in Europe, Mount Ararat in Asia, the Cordilleras in the New World—are they to be the last? In a word, will the terrestrial sphere for ever preserve the form under which we know it—as it has been, so to speak, impressed on our memories by the maps of the geographers? ”

“ Slowly, but surely, human and animal races were impelled toward the equator, multiplying prodigiously, and warring upon each other with ferocity indescribable. Your scientists have not yet declared the certain existence of preglacial man, thus my assertion that Earth has experienced two glacial horrors, and that previous to the last one the genus homo was distributed over nearly all portions of the inhabitable globe is not likely to be received as a conclusive statement, which however is a correct one. ”

“ He must have regarded the earth as flat and supposed that it required considerable force and power to induce the water to leave the mountains and collect in the valleys. Just as soon as the water was forced to run down hill, the dry land appeared, and the grass began to grow, and the mantles of green were thrown over the shoulders of the hills, and the trees laughed into bud and blossom, and the branches were laden with fruit. ”

“ If, therefore, the Author of nature had not been prodigal of those numerous contrivances, before alluded to, for spreading all classes of organic beings over the earth—if he had not ordained that the fluctuations of the animate and inanimate creation should be in perfect harmony with each other, it is evident that considerable spaces, now the most habitable on the globe, would soon be as devoid of life as are the Alpine snows, or the dark abysses of the ocean, or the moving sands of the Sahara. ”

“ Earth is spread about you, nude and quite unconscious of the restless presence of man. A variety of delicate and transparent tints are shed over the modelling, due to the atmosphere and the volcanic nature of the soil. The hues deepen in the blue ribands of the flowing waters, in the gem-like appearance of those that are still. ”

“ Break of day in Winter time comes to the Dead Lands slowly and without enthusiasm, as if the rosy morning sun wearied at the hopeless landscape which its rays must illumine. Aimless rock formation was a drug on the creation’s market the day that the Bad Lands were made. ”

“ When we find in the glacial beds the leaves of trees still living in North America and Europe, and consider the vicissitudes of elevation and submergence of the land, and of Arctic and temperate climates which have occurred, we are struck with the persistence of the weak things of life, as compared with the changeableness of rocks and mountains. A superficial observer might think the fern or the moss of a granite hill a frail and temporary thing as compared with solid and apparently everlasting rock. ”

“ This mysterious and awful visitant, which convulses the earth apparently without warning, is, however, like all the manifestations of nature, preceded by signs which the observing and understanding eye can perceive and calculate upon as unerringly as the astronomer can determine the approach of a comet.
The inhabitable earth is merely a shell or crust over the great mass of uninhabitable matter. The world beneath the earth’s surface is as diversified as the world above. ”

“ At divers epochs the crust of the globe will have been rent and dislocated, giving vent to floods of fused mineral matter; these, solidifying in their turn, will have produced those inequalities of the earth’s surface which we call mountains; enormous inequalities, as they appear to us; mole-hills or grains of sand if we compare them with the volume of the terrestrial sphere. ”

“ Those rude memorials of human art would in such case have belonged to the same age as a state of the waters implying a distribution of land and water very different from that which now prevails, and belonging to an earlier condition of the earth’s surface; which must not, however, be confounded with that in which the earlier vegetation which adorned our planet, the gigantic bodies of extinct land animals, and the oceanic creatures of a more chaotic state, became entombed in the indurating crust of globe. ”

“ When we reflect, therefore, on the fractional state of the annals which are handed down to us, and how little even these have as yet been studied, we may wonder that so many geologists should attribute every break in the series of strata and every gap in the past history of the organic world to catastrophes and convulsions of the earth's crust or to leaps made by the creational force from species to species, or from class to class. ”