The Adventures of a Grain of Dust

by Hallam Hawksworth

[THE LITTLE ARTISTS THAT SHAPE THE CLOUDS]

But the shapes of clouds are supposed to be due to another thing, the mysterious force we call electricity, and that other mysterious force we call gravity. Just as the worlds attract each other by gravity so these raindrops—or dust grains growing into raindrops—are drawn toward one another. Here's where Electricity steps in. These rain particles are full of electricity and when two of these electrified particles meet in the air—unless they strike one another in falling, in which case, as I said a moment ago, they blend into one—they get very close together and yet keep dancing around one another without touching! It is this dancing about that makes all those strange and beautiful and ever-changing forms in the vast picture-gallery of the sky.

Of course the wind currents help to change these shapes, but I'm talking about the original designs.

II. The Raindrops and the River Mills

So much for the dust that helps make raindrops; now for the raindrops that help make dust. This the raindrops do in several ways. Falling on big rocks or decaying pebbles, for example, they pound loose with their patter, patter, patter, any little bits of soil and grains of sand that have been made by the other soil makers—the sun, the wind, the lichens, the chemists of the air, and so on. This soil and these sand particles, if there is already any depth of earth there, they carry down into the ground. Some of this soil, with various stops and mixings with other soils on the way, finally reaches the sea, where it helps to make the rich limestone soils for the Kentuckies of millenniums yet to be, by supplying food for sea creatures and lime for their shells. For these shells become limestone when the shell-fish are through with them. Mother Nature, in addition to feeding her big, hungry families of to-day in the plant and animal world, is always laying by something for the future. But before it gets back to the sea, by far the greatest part of the ground-up soil the rivers carry is spread out in the lowlands in those "alluvial plains" your geography tells about and that make a large proportion of the fertile farms of the world. If the raindrops fall on comparatively barren rock—in the mountains, say—they carry some of this fresh soil to the mountain valleys below, and some of it they may spread in bottom-lands a thousand miles away, where the new soil helps feed the plants. The sand grains in it not only help the soil to get its breath by making little air spaces, but these sand grains themselves slowly decay and so make more soil.

WHAT IRRIGATION DOES FOR DESERTS

It is such land as this, in the arid regions of the West, that irrigation converts from a desert to a garden of abundance. The soil is rich in all the substances that plant life needs.

But it isn't alone that they carry away the soil already made and bury the sand grains. Some of the raindrops soak into cracks in stones and dissolve the material that binds the rock particles together, and so get them ready to give way under the fairy hammers of the next shower that comes along.