Imagine yourself in a galley bowling westward under the Levanter compelled to go further north than you had wished: the wind dropping. Then your hanging about all night off the coast of what is now the Stes. Maries, and then at morning hearing with fright, but with wonder, on your starboard beam to the North, the enormous noise of waters, and seeing the flecks of foam go by you, and catching on the horizon a sort of low tumble or cataract or flood reaching the sea over twenty miles of beach and carrying with it half a county of stones from the hills. There the stones are to this day—a vast plain of sterile pebbles from a fist to a pea. The ancients said that Hercules once passed that way.
Or think what it must have been to stand on the Ventoux and see the melting of the ice from Auvergne. Or to stand driven upward on to the hills of the Artois, and to see the waters rising in the Dover strait below.
For the thing went very quickly, make no doubt of that.
There is a superstition for the moment in favour of slow, very slow, changes in the affairs of this earth. I think that superstition has arisen from a muddle-headed hope that slow work can exclude a Creator and Will. At any rate there is no proof for it. Some of the processes have been very slow (they are exceedingly slow to-day), but some jerks have been rapid enough: revolutionary: catastrophic: and the last melting of the ice was of these.
And what do you suppose happened in the splendid valleys of Norway? To-day they are drowned. What recession of the ice filled them more full? How did man come to occupy the land released? During what intermission of time, during what generations (few and creative) did the tall fair race, for a moment wanderers, build their little simple structure of a religion which we know so little (because what we have of it is wholly intermixed with the Roman) and of a language which we know still less (for that also is mixed with the South), but at any rate of a special culture common to but a few thousands of men. How came these Scandinavians to copy Roman ships? It all came after the melting of the ice.
Then I ask myself what men saw, and what they felt as they saw, the waterfalls. For those marked all Europe also. Glaciers we know to-day. We have but to imagine them expanded, and the landscape is the same. Stand on the Maladetta and conceive the field of ice holding not only the shoulder of the mountain but all the valley below and out to the plain of France, and you only have the replica of what a man may see from Mont Blanc. Or stand on an Alpine peak and imagine the sheets of ice and snow below you, spread, covering every rock for as far as the eye can reach, and you only have a repetition of what men still see in Greenland. But we have no modern parallel (save in perhaps half a dozen places on the whole earth) by which to reconstruct the enormity of the waterfalls of those days.
For there were not only these swirling waters carving out the great valleys, there was the thundering of water down over the ledges, thousand upon thousand. Perhaps they helped to scoop out the smaller lakes more than did the ice before them. There must have been some such sight above Grenoble when the great lake which burst seven hundred years ago was forming. For in the beginning that lake basin in which Bourg d'Oisans now stands must have been a mass of ice, and then as the ice melted and as the glacier above it melted all the way up to La Grave, up to the very shoulders of the Pelvoux, what mighty armies of water must have roared down to the trench of the Isere! And wherever there is to-day a gorge (or, at least, in the most of these cuttings) you must have had the same sight. Their little dwindling descendants now and then show a trickle of water for our amusement and we are still astonished. But the grandfathers of these were giants!
They say also that the sea rose. It may have done so. Perhaps it must have done so. And if it did so what a sight must that also not have been: the cutting of the straits.
I have read of but one part of the world in which a tradition remains of such a change, and in that case it may have been an earthquake rather than a rising of the waters: I mean the Straits of Messina. Of the water flooding in here there is a legend; but there is none remaining of the cutting of the chalk between Kent and the Artois; or of the flooding, if it were flooded, of the channel between the Pillars of Hercules; or of the slower lap which gradually just covered the entrances of the Baltic—a fresh-water lake.
And by the way, what made that most amazing issue whereby the Black Sea feeds the Eastern Mediterranean with a continuous stream? I have read so many guesses, and they have not satisfied me. It is so long, so narrow, so artificial, and double at that. Very changed would the history of the world have been—of the modern world—if Nature had played some freak of the same sort to join the central Atlantic and the central Pacific Seas, or if the low sand between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean had not run dry, or if by some shock the Mediterranean had poured into the Jordan valley.