Omega: The Last days of the World

by Camille Flammarion

THE RUINS OF PARIS.

Paris itself, finally abandoned in the sixtieth century, when the sea had surrounded it as it now does Havre, was, in the eighty-fifth century, covered with water to the height of the towers of Notre Dame, and all that memorable plain, where were wrought out, during so many years, the most brilliant of the world’s civilizations, was swept by angry waves.[^[3]]

[3]. In the nineteenth century, researches in natural history had revealed the fact that secular vertical oscillations, vary with the locality, were taking place in the earth’s crust, and had proved that, from prehistoric times, the soil of western and southern France had been slowly sinking and the sea slowly gaining upon the land. One after another, the islands of Jersey, of Minquiers, of Chaussey, of Écrehou, of Cezembre, of Mont-Saint-Michel, had been detached from the continent by the sea; the cities of Is, Helion, Tommen, Portzmeûr, Harbour, Saint Louis, Monny, Bourgneuf, La Feillette, Paluel and Nazado had been buried beneath its waves, and the Armorican peninsula had slowly retreated before the advancing waters. The hour of this invasion by the sea had struck, from century to century, also for Herbavilla; to the west of Nantes; for Saint-Denis-Chef-de-Caux, to the north of Havre; for Saint-Etienne-de-Paluel and for Gardoine, to the north of Dol; for Tolente, to the west of Brest; more than eighty habitable cities of Holland had been submerged in the eleventh century, etc., etc. In other regions the reverse had taken place, and the sea had retired; but to the north and west of Paris this double action of the subsidence of the land and the wearing away of the shores had, in less than seven thousand years, made Paris accessible to ships of the greatest tonnage.

As in the case of languages, ideas, customs and laws, so, also, the manner of reckoning time had changed. It was still reckoned by years and centuries, but the Christian era had been discarded, as also the holy days of the calendar and the eras of the Mussulman, Jewish, Chinese and African chronologies. There was now a single calendar for the entire race, composed of twelve months, divided into four equal trimesters of three months of thirty-one, thirty, and thirty days, each trimester containing exactly thirteen weeks. New Year’s Day was a fête day, and was not reckoned in with the year; every bisextile year there were two. The week had been retained. Every year commenced on the same day—Monday; and the same dates always corresponded to the same days of the week. The year began with the vernal equinox all over the world. The era, a purely astronomical division of time, began with the coincidence of the December solstice with perihelion, and was renewed every 25,765 years. This rational method had succeeded the fantastic divisions of time formerly in use.

The geographical features of France, of Europe and of the entire world had become modified, from century to century. Seas had replaced continents, and new deposits at the bottom of the ocean covered the vanished ages, forming new geological strata. Elsewhere, continents had taken the place of seas. At the mouth of the Rhone, for example, where the dry land had already encroached upon the sea from Arles to the littoral, the continent gained to the south; in Italy, the deposits of the Po had continued to gain upon the Adriatic, as those of the Nile, the Tiber, and other rivers of later origin, had gained upon the Mediterranean; and in other places the dunes had increased, by various amounts, the domain of the dry land. The contours of seas and continents had so changed that it would have been absolutely impossible to make out the ancient geographical maps of history.

The historian of nature does not deal with periods of five centuries, like the Arab of the thirteenth century mentioned in the legend related a moment ago. Ten times this period would scarcely suffice to modify, sensibly, the configuration of the land, for five thousand years are but a ripple on the ocean of time. It is by tens of thousands of years that one must reckon if one would see continents sink below the level of seas, and new territories emerging into the sunlight, as the result of the secular changes in the level of the earth’s crust, whose thickness and density varies from place to place, and whose weight, resting upon the still plastic and mobile interior, causes vast areas to oscillate. A slight disturbance of the equilibrium, an insignificant dip of the scales, a change of less than a hundred meters, often, in the length of the earth’s diameter of twelve thousand kilometers, is sufficient to transform the surface of the world.

And if we examine the ensemble of the history of the earth, by periods of one hundred thousand years, for example, we see, that in ten of these great epochs, that is, in a million years, the surface of the globe has been many times transformed.

If we advance into the future a period of one or two million years, we witness a vast flux and reflux of life and things. How many times in this period of ten or twenty thousand centuries, how many times have the waves of the sea covered the former dwelling-places of man! How many times the earth has emerged anew, fresh and regenerated, from the abysses of the ocean! In primitive times, when the still warm and liquid planet was covered only by a thin shell, cooling on the surface of the burning ocean within, these changes took place brusquely, by sudden breaking down of natural barriers, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and the uprising of mountain ranges. Later, as this superficial crust grew thicker and became consolidated, these transformations were more gradual; the slow contraction of the earth had led to the formation of hollow spaces within the solid envelope, to the falling in of portions of this envelope upon the liquid nucleus, and finally to oscillating movements which had changed the profile of the continents. Later still, insensible modifications had been produced by external agents; on the one hand the rivers, constantly carrying to their mouths the débris of the mountains, had filled up the depths of the sea and slowly increased the area of the dry land, making in time inland cities of ancient seaports; and on the other hand, the action of the waves and of storms, constantly eating away the shores, had increased the area of the ocean at the expense of the dry land. Ceaselessly the geographical configuration of the shore had changed. For the historian our planet had become another world. Everything had changed: continents, seas, shores, races, languages, customs, body and mind, sentiments, ideas—everything. France beneath the waves, the bottom of the Atlantic in the light of the sun, a portion of the United States gone, a continent in the place of Oceanica, China submerged; death where was life, and life where was death; and everywhere sunk into eternal oblivion all which had once constituted the glory and greatness of nations. If today one of us should emigrate to Mars, he would find himself more at home than if, after the lapse of these future ages, he should return to the earth.