[Sidenote: 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 {22} 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.
Before there was any polar cold on Earth, when the magnolia blossomed
in Greenland, this cloudy rain-swept country was warm enough for
tapirs. As the sky cleared it managed to harbour camels, and became
a pasturage for animals of the horse family. Let us see then whether
these were of the actual species we call the horse.
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[Sidenote: The landscape]
THE LANDSCAPE. Warm lands with little sunlight, such as Ireland,
have green turfed grasses. The polar summer which is one long day
covers all pastures with a blaze of flowers. The bushes also yield a
bounty of blossom and wild fruit. The mosquito season is the great
event of the year.
So we may see the meadows beside the lower Yukon, green pasture
starred with flowers, bushed, wet, mosquito-stricken range for the
bearded Celtic pony, utterly unlike the sun-baked golden steppe of
the Dun horse. We must cast back to earlier times when Bering Land
was clouded, torrid, range for ancestors of our modern horses, the
pasture which changed the brown tapir of Brazil into the skewbald
tapir of Malaya. At that time pre-glacial America had seven species
of three-toed horse-ancestors, some of which may have ranged westward
across Bering Land into Asia, and there given birth to the stock of
the Old World.
With the onset of the Great Ice Age the growing weight of the
American Ice-cap seems to have strained the loose skin of the Earth,
which, in the Columbia Basin cracked, pouring forth floods of lava to
overwhelm a region nine hundred miles in length, eight hundred wide.
{24} A series of rock waves folded, forming the coast or island
ranges from California northward and culminating in the stupendous
Alps of St. Elias. There gathered a lesser Ice-cap, pouring its
glaciers down the Alaskan and British Columbian fjords.
It was this barrier of ice which put an end to all migrations of
animals. The Alps of St. Elias closed the path-way between those two
groups of continents which so far had been the common breeding ground
for beasts and men. Within the narrowed breeding ground of the
Americas the horse together with the camel, and many other species,
became extinct.
[Sidenote: The deluge]
Old Bering Land had become sub-Arctic, the home of the Mammoth, a
maned roan elephant. Then the Pacific flooded the plains of the
Lower Yukon, and formed the shoals of Bering Sea. Both in Asia and
in America faint memories remain of a drowned world. In Assyria and
in British Columbia the legend tells us of a hero, and of rescued
folk in a fleet of three hundred canoes.
So the two groups of continents were finally cut apart at Bering
Straits. And now a ring of flaming craters girdles the Pacific, the
fit finale to a tremendous drama.
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