These two large echelons of the sou'-wester carried the vapour which once fell as snow to form the Icefields of the Great Ice Age.
The Ice-cap
The skies were clearing. The planet was being stripped of its cloud roof, so that its warmth from the sun was radiated at night and in winter directly into Space. Except to leeward of the Gulf Stream, the lands of the North Atlantic are still sub-Arctic as in Labrador. These lands were more extensive then than now, forming a bridge about a thousand miles wide from Arctic Canada across Smith's Sound to Greenland, and thence by way of the Faroes to Scotland, which was part of the European main. On this bleak bridge which spanned the North Atlantic permanent snows heaped up to mountainous heights forming the nucleus of the giant Ice-cap. Its western lobe touched the Rocky Mountains and the Missouri Valley, its eastern wing covered the Russian plains as far as Moscow, and southward flooded the German Empire. It may be that the North Atlantic bridge, remnant of an elder continent, sank slowly until it foundered under its load of ice. So the sea melted the ice and the climate began to mend.
EASTERN REGION. A third echelon of the sou'-wester comes from the equatorial belt of South America down to 15°S. This does not take up any great load of moisture, for the wind blows nearly dry across the heights of air which overhang the Atlantic. It has little moisture to spare for the Mediterranean summer, none at all for the levels of the Sahara, Arabia, Persia, and the deserts of Central Asia. The lands to leeward of Brazil are deserts.
FAR EASTERN REGION. In Asia, the movements of the sou'-wester are complicated by the south-west monsoon, and the immense ranges of the Himalaya. Eastward lies one more echelon of the South-west Counter Trade. Just as the sou'-wester in the North Atlantic is warmed by the Gulf Stream, so the sou'-wester of the North Pacific is warmed by the Japan current. Before the uplift of the St. Elias Alps, the region of Alaska, and of Bering-Sea was a warm and well-watered lowland. Alaska still grows gigantic timber in latitudes where North Scotland and South Norway have only scrubby bushes.
PART IV. THE STORY OF BERING LAND.
Bering land
Any reader who is really and truly interested in tapirs will remember that some live in the Malay States, and the rest of them in South and Central America. Between these countries there is a slightly flattened facet of the planet filled from remote ages by the Pacific Ocean. Nobody with the slightest liking for tapirs would suspect them of swimming across, and since their family existed there has been no land passage round the southern edge of the Pacific. So, if we would find the ancient tapir range which once connected Malaya with Mexico and Brazil, we are driven to search for a pathway round the North Pacific.
The map of the ocean floor shows the Pacific Deep as reaching northward to the sixtieth parallel. Beyond that lie the new shoals of Bering Sea, with a ground-swell so terrific in winter that I have seen a hard-bitten middle-aged seaman driven mad with fear. This is the site of Bering Land, an ancient country about the size of Scandinavia, which joined the mainlands of Asia and North America. The latitudes of this land were those of Norway, and it formed the basin of the lower Yukon.