“As clouds, my little friend. Let us recall something I told you a while ago.
“The heat of the sun causes water to evaporate; it reduces it to something invisible, to vapor that is dissipated in the air. Seas present a surface three times that of the dry land. Over these immensities there is constantly taking place an enormous evaporation, raising into the air a part of the waters of the sea. The vapor thus formed becomes clouds; the clouds are borne in all directions, letting down snow and rain; this rain and melted snow penetrate the ground, filter down and give birth to springs, which gradually, by their union, become brooks, streams, and rivers.”
“I see why the water of brooks is not salt,” said Jules, “although it comes from the sea. When you put salt water in a plate in the sun, only the water goes away; the salt remains. The vapor that rises from the sea is not salt, because the salt does not go with it when it forms. So streams fed by snow and rain that fall from the clouds cannot be salt.”
“What you have just told us is very remarkable, Uncle,” observed Claire. “All water-courses, rivers, streams, torrents, brooks, come from and return to the sea.”
“They come from the sea, an inexhaustible reservoir that covers with its waters a surface three times larger than that of all the continents joined together; from the sea, whose abysses go down at some places to the depth of 14 kilometers, and receive unceasingly the tribute of all the water-courses of the world, without ever being taxed beyond their capacity. The enormous surface of the sea furnishes the air with vapor which turns into clouds; later these clouds dissolve in rain and, chased by the wind, travel like immense watering-pots over the ground, rendering it fertile. In their turn, rain and snow, precipitated by the clouds, give birth to the rivers that carry their waters to the sea. In that way a continual current is effected which, starting from the sea, returns to the sea, after having traveled through the atmosphere in the form of clouds, watered the earth as rain, and crossed continents as rivers.
“The sea is the common reservoir of the waters. Rivers, springs, fountains, every little brooklet, all come from and all return to it. The water of a dewdrop, the water that circulates in the sap of plants, the water that forms beads of perspiration on our foreheads, all come from the sea and are on their way back to it. However small the little drop, do not fear that it will lose its way. If the arid sand drinks it up, the sun will know how to draw it out again and send it to rejoin the vapor in the atmosphere and, sooner or later, to reënter the ocean-basin. Nothing is lost, nothing escapes the eye of God, who has measured the oceans in the hollow of His hand, and knows the number of their drops of water.”
CHAPTER LXXVI
THE SWARM
UNCLE PAUL was still talking when they heard a persistent noise in the garden: pom! pom! pom! pom! as if some smith had set up his anvil under the big elder-tree. They ran to see what it was. Jacques was gravely tapping with a key on the watering can: pom! pom! pom! pom! Mother Ambroisine was busily beating a copper saucepan with a small stone: pom! pom! pom! pom!
Have our two good servants lost their heads, that they are giving themselves up, with the most serious air in the world, to this charivari? Without suspending their singular occupation, they exchange a few words. “They are going toward the currant-bush,” says Jacques. “They look as if they were going away,” answers Mother Ambroisine; and the pom! pom! pom! pom! is resumed.