Life here? This was the Beginning. There was a shore line quite near us. It wavered and blurred as the centuries altered it. A reach of shallow water where the waves rolled up against the bleak land-rocks. Life was beginning there. In the shallows of the sea I could envisage the microscopic protoplasms, like algae that form the green scum on a pond, lying here in the shallows. Restless, irritable organisms! Desiring food to eat. Urged by the primitive spark of life to eat and grow and multiply.
Unending sweep of changing land and sea and these living things within it! A million years swept into the Past in a moment. An unfamiliar scene here now. A different sweep of land—a different reach of sea. A land rising to the west as though a great serrated mountain chain had heaved up in those whirling centuries. Gray, shadowy mountains—bleak ghosts of rocky peaks. Dark valleys dank with heavy vapors; a coastal plain against which the sea was beating.
I could fancy that on the lower steppes of this more solid crust vegetation now was taking hold. We were passing too fast for any details. There were fleeting glimpses of what might have been vegetation. A forest—springing from nothing, existing and vanishing while I blinked. But I could seem to see a forest, springing into lush life from the heated soil; growing to a jungle; whirled away in a cataclysm that tore and ripped all this land and water. Or a forest that grew, lived and decayed; enriched the soil with other, different giants of trees to live after it.
We were going forward too fast for such tiny details. But the great changes were obvious.
Again, beyond what I actually saw, my fancy roamed. From the shore-water protoplasms, the restless living things had ventured now. The ocean was peopled. Great swimming reptiles had been here and were here now. Nature's first efforts—from the microscopic protoplasms to these great monsters of the sea! Millions of years developing toward size only. The ages of life gigantic! We were sweeping through them now.
Amphibians were living now. I can conceive the first such sea creature with its restless urge for experimentation—the urge within it, forcing it to try for something better—I can imagine it coming from the deeps into the shallow water of the shore. Venturing further; rearing its great head up from the water into the air. Trying again; lunging—dragging its great length up to the land. Feeling the sunlight.
The ages of the giants! Huge, heavy-armored things—armored so that the battle for existence might be won and life go on. Tremendous swimming, walking and flying reptiles, peopling the sea, the land and the air. Evolving through one-celled to many-celled organisms; to sea-squirts and sluggish giant sea-worms; and, millions of years still farther, to the vertebrates, and then the giant mammals. Nature struggling for size in the individual. The ages of the giants!
As restless as the changing life was the changing environment. I saw the mountains rise and drop; and the sea surge in and back again; an instant when for ten thousand centuries there must have been great heat here—and then a sweep of ice.
Throughout it all, life struggled, adapting itself, patiently trying new forms; driven away from here by hostile nature—but coming back again. Struggling.