For remember that, from a point above Berber to the sea, the dwindling Nile never receives a single tributary, a single drop of fresh water. For more than fifteen hundred miles the ever-lessening river rolls on between bare desert hills and spreads fertility over the deep valley in their midst—just as far as its own mud sheet can cover the barren rocky bottom, and no farther. For the most part the line of demarcation between the grey bare desert and the cultivable plain is as clear and as well-defined as the margin of sea and land: you can stand with one foot on the barren rock and one on the green soil of the tilled and irrigated mud-land. For the water rises up to a certain level, and to that level accordingly it distributes both mud and moisture: above it comes the arid rock, as destitute of life, as dead and bare and lonely as the centre of Sahara. In and out, in waving line, up to the base of the hills, cultivation and greenery follow, with absolute accuracy, the line of highest flood-level; beyond it the hot rock stretches dreary and desolate. Here and there islands of sandstone stand out above the green sea of doura or cotton; here and there a bay of fertility runs away up some lateral valley, following the course of the mud; but one inch above the inundation-mark vegetation and life stop short all at once with absolute abruptness. In Egypt, then, more than anywhere else, one sees with one's own eyes that mud and moisture are the very conditions of mundane fertility.
Beyond Cairo, as one descends seaward, the mud begins to open out fan-wise and form a delta. The narrow mountain ranges no longer hem it in. It has room to expand and spread itself freely over the surrounding country, won by degrees from the Mediterranean. At the mouths the mud pours out into the sea and forms fresh deposits constantly on the bottom, which are gradually silting up still newer lands to seaward. Slow as is the progress of this land-forming action, there can be no doubt that the Nile has the intention of filling up by degrees the whole eastern Mediterranean, and that in process of time—say in no more than a few million years or so, a mere bagatelle to the geologist—with the aid of the Po and some other lesser streams, it will transform the entire basin of the inland sea into a level and cultivable plain, like Bengal or Mesopotamia, themselves (as we shall see) the final result of just such silting action.
It is so very important, for those who wish to see things "as clear as mud," to understand this prime principle of the formation of mud-lands, that I shall make no apology for insisting on it further in some little detail; for when one comes to look the matter plainly in the face, one can see in a minute that almost all the big things in human history have been entirely dependent upon the mud of the great rivers. Thebes and Memphis, Rameses and Amenhotep, based their civilisation absolutely upon the mud of Nile. The bricks of Babylon were moulded of Euphrates mud; the greatness of Nineveh reposed on the silt of the Tigris. Upper India is the Indus; Agra and Delhi are Ganges and Jumna mud; China is the Hoang Ho and the Yang-tse-Kiang; Burmah is the paddy field of the Irrawaddy delta. And so many great plains in either hemisphere consist really of nothing else but mud-banks of almost incredible extent, filling up prehistoric Baltics and Mediterraneans, that a glance at the probable course of future evolution in this respect may help us to understand and to realize more fully the gigantic scale of some past accumulations.
As a preliminary canter I shall trot out first the valley of the Po, the existing mud flat best known by personal experience to the feet and eyes of the tweed-clad English tourist. Everybody who has looked down upon the wide Lombard plain from the pinnacled roof of Milan Cathedral, or who has passed by rail through that monotonous level of poplars and vines between Verona and Venice, knows well what a mud flat due to inundation and gradual silting up of a valley looks like. What I want to do now is to inquire into its origin, and to follow up in fancy the same process, still in action, till it has filled the Adriatic from end to end with one great cultivable lowland.
Once upon a time (I like to be at least as precise as a fairy tale in the matter of dates) there was no Lombardy. And that time was not, geologically speaking, so very remote; for the whole valley of the Po, from Turin to the sea, consists entirely of alluvial deposits—or, in other words, of Alpine mud—which has all accumulated where it now lies at a fairly recent period. We know it is recent, because no part of Italy has ever been submerged since it began to gather there. To put it more definitely, the entire mass has almost certainly been laid down since the first appearance of man on our earth: the earliest human beings who reached the Alps or the Apennines—black savages clad in skins of extinct wild beasts—must have looked down from their slopes, with shaded eyes, not on a level plain such as we see to-day, but on a great arm of the sea which stretched like a gulf far up towards the base of the hills about Turin and Rivoli. Of this ancient sea the Adriatic forms the still unsilted portion. In other words, the great gulf which now stops short at Trieste and Venice once washed the foot of the Alps and the Apennines to the Superga at Turin, covering the sites of Padua, Ferrara, Bologna, Ravenna, Mantua, Cremona, Modena, Parma, Piacenza, Pavia, Milan, and Novara. The industrious reader who gets out his Baedeker and looks up the shaded map of North Italy which forms its frontispiece will be rewarded for his pains by a better comprehension of the district thus demarcated. The idle must be content to take my word for what follows. I pledge them my honour that I'll do my best not to deceive their trustful innocence.
It may sound at first hearing a strange thing to say so, but the whole of that vast gulf, from Turin to Venice, has been entirely filled up within the human period by the mud sheet brought down by mountain torrents from the Alps and the Apennines.
A parallel elsewhere will make this easier of belief. You have looked down, no doubt, from the garden of the hotel at Glion upon the lake of Geneva and the valley of the Rhone about Villeneuve and Aigle. If so, you can understand from personal knowledge the first great stage in the mud-filling process; for you must have observed for yourself from that commanding height that the lake once extended a great deal farther up country towards Bex and St. Maurice than it does at present. You can still trace at once on either side the old mountainous banks, descending into the plain as abruptly and unmistakably as they still descend to the water's edge at Montreux and Vevey. But the silt of the Rhone, brought down in great sheets of glacier mud (about which more anon) from the Furca and the Jungfrau and the Monte Rosa chain, has completely filled in the upper nine miles of the old lake basin with a level mass of fertile alluvium. There is no doubt about the fact: you can see it for yourself with half an eye from that specular mount (to give the Devil his due, I quote Milton's Satan): the mud lies even from bank to bank, raised only a few inches above the level of the lake, and as lacustrine in effect as the veriest geologist on earth could wish it. Indeed, the process of filling up still continues unabated at the present day where the mud-laden Rhone enters the lake at Bouveret, to leave it again, clear and blue and beautiful, under the bridge at Geneva. The little delta which the river forms at its mouth shows the fresh mud in sheets gathering thick upon the bottom. Every day this new mud-bank pushes out farther and farther into the water, so that in process of time the whole basin will be filled in, and a level plain, like that which now spreads from Bex and Aigle to Villeneuve, will occupy the entire bed from Montreux to Geneva.
Turn mentally to the upper feeders of the Po itself, and you find the same causes equally in action. You have stopped at Pallanza—Garoni's is so comfortable. Well, then, you know how every Alpine stream, as it flows, full-gorged, into the Italian lakes, is busily engaged in filling them up as fast as ever it can with turbid mud from the uplands. The basins of Maggiore, Como, Lugano, and Garda are by origin deep hollows scooped out long since during the Great Ice Age by the pressure of huge glaciers that then spread far down into what is now the poplar-clad plain of Lombardy. But ever since the ice cleared away, and the torrents began to rush headlong down the deep gorges of the Val Leventina and the Val Maggia, the mud has been hard at work, doing its level best to fill those great ice-worn bowls up again. Near the mouth of each main stream it has already succeeded in spreading a fan-shaped delta. I will not insult you by asking you at the present time of day whether you have been over the St. Gothard. In this age of trains de luxe I know to my cost everybody has been everywhere. No chance of pretending to superior knowledge about Japan or Honolulu; the tourist knows them. Very well, then; you must remember as you go past Bellinzona—revolutionary little Bellinzona with its three castled crags—you look down upon a vast mud flat by the mouth of the Ticino. Part of this mud flat is already solid land, but part is mere marsh or shifting quicksand. That is the first stage in the abolition of the lakes: the mud is annihilating them.
Maggiore, indeed, least fortunate of the three main sheets, is being attacked by the insidious foe at three points simultaneously. At the upper end, the Ticino, that furious radical river, has filled in a large arm, which once spread far away up the valley towards Bellinzona. A little lower down, the Maggia near Locarno carries in a fresh contribution of mud, which forms another fan-shaped delta, and stretches its ugly mass half across the lake, compelling the steamers to make a considerable detour eastward. This delta is rapidly extending into the open water, and will in time fill in the whole remaining space from bank to bank, cutting off the upper end of the lake about Locarno from the main basin by a partition of lowland. This upper end will then form a separate minor lake, and the Ticino will flow out of it across the intervening mud flat into the new and smaller Maggiore of our great-great-grandchildren. If you doubt it, look what the torrent of the Toce, the third assailing battalion of the persistent mud force, has already done in the neighbourhood of Pallanza. It has entirely cut off the upper end of the bay, that turns westward towards the Simplon, by a partition of mud; and this isolated upper bit forms now in our own day a separate lake, the Lago di Mergozzo, divided from the main sheet by an uninteresting mud bank. In process of time, no doubt, the whole of Maggiore will be similarly filled in by the advancing mud sheet, and will become a level alluvial plain, surrounded by mountains, and greatly admired by the astute Piedmontese cultivator.
What is going on in Maggiore is going on equally in all the other sub-Alpine lakes of the Po valley. They are being gradually filled in, every one of them, by the aggressive mud sheet. The upper end of Lugano, for example, has already been cut off, as the Lago del Piano, from the main body; and the piano itself, from which the little isolated tarn takes its name, is the alluvial mud fiat of a lateral torrent—the mud flat, in fact, which the railway from Porlezza traverses for twenty minutes before it begins its steep and picturesque climb by successive zigzags over the mountains to Menaggio. Similarly the influx of the Adda at the upper end of Como has cut off the Lago di Mezzola from the main lake, and has formed the alluvial level that stretches so drearily all around Colico. Slowly the mud fiend encroaches everywhere on the lakes; and if you look for him when you go, there you can see him actually at work every spring under your very eyes, piling up fresh banks and deltas with alarming industry, and preparing (in a few hundred thousand years) to ruin the tourist trade of Cadenabbia and Bellagio.