Tales of the Chesapeake

by George Alfred Townsend

A mournful chorus of croons from the loons went round the solitude. "Phosphates! phew! Phosphates! phew!"

"This apartment," exclaimed the one-legged bird, "is exclusively for fungi of the old families. Here we rot piecemeal and furnish gas to the nine-thousandth generation after us. By our decay the springs are fed with bubbles. Here is the world as it fell in the floral period, and our boughs are budding anew in the Eldorado of the waters above us."

"Phosphates! phew!" shouted the great birds of this land of Lethe, as Mr. Waples' stalagmite broke off and dropped him and set him astride of an ancient pterodactyl bird that flew off with its burden to an immense height, and swinging him there by the seat of his breeches, as if he were to be the pendulum of a fundamental and firmamental clock, the griffin-bird finally let go. Mr. Waples was propelled at least six miles out of gravity, and tossed into a most deep and silent lake. Nothing affected its loveliness but an oppressive shadow that came from above, and seemed to sink every floating object in the scarcely buoyant waves. No shores were visible, but distant mountains on one side; nothing lived in the waters but meteoric lights and objects that ran as if on errands for the spirit above. Broad, submissive, unevaporating, but sinking down; the great inland lonely pool was everywhere the creature of an invisible footprint. Mr. Waples knew the power it obeyed to be that prostrate, cloud-like, overbrooding presence, far above, with outlines like a mountain range. The silent sea was the water-trough of Apalachia, the western dyke of the deluge of Noah. The oppressive spirit, stretching overhead, was Bellydown, or the thing that brooded over the waters of chaos, known to schoolmasters as Atmospheric Pressure.

Mr. Waples saw it all now. The spirit overhead, with equal and eternal pressure, forced down this meteoric water through the slopes of stone, until it reascended toward the clouds of its origin and was lost in the forest of the fossils, where every decaying fibre made bubbles to drive it forward, and hold in solution the mineral substances it was to receive in the porous magnesian barrier between it and freedom. Soaking through this, the water escaped by the break in the strata at the arch of the Fault Finder.

But who had ever passed back against the current of the earth's barometry, from the spa to the reservoir, like Andrew Waples, of Horntown, Eastern Shore of Virginia?

He felt a mighty vanity overwhelm him to get recognition of some kind from Bellydown, who disdained even thunder for a language.

"Thou sprawling spirit, up yonder in the sky!" shouted Mr. Waples, with much firmness, "if thou art not mere nightmare, mere figment of the sciences, let me feel thy strength unequally, for once!"

The vast cloud object moved and yawned. Something like a small world, wearing a boot, smote Andrew Waples in the rear, as if the spirit above had kicked him on the proper spot. He felt a pain and a flying sensation, that was like paralysis on wings, and he never seemed to stop for years, until he fell and struck the ground, and, after an interval, looked around him.

He was in his room, at the United States Hotel, and had fallen out of bed. The clock in the Baptist church cupola struck two. On the gas bracket was pinned a written notice, not yet dry, that Andrew Waples had just started for the High Rock Spring.