The North Sea is only a recent flood in an old river valley. We must
consider it not as a tract of permanent water, but as a lost hunting
ground of our own ancestors, a pasturage for horses not very long ago.
[Sidenote: A valley in Cloudland]
In the year 5200 B.C. the Scandinavian glaciers, shrinking at the
rate of about one mile a year (the rate of shrinkage in the Alps of
St. Elias), withdrew from the province of Finland and the Baltic
Lake. Let us suppose that, in that year a traveller from civilised
Egypt made his way down the Rhine, and so entered the valley of North
River, which is now flooded by the North Sea. At first this river
wound its level way between low chalk downs, but presently the Thames
came in from the West, and forested swampy clay-lands extended
northward. Abreast of Aberdeen came the last chalk downs, and beyond
that lay Arctic tundras where the delta widened to an ice-drifted sea
nearly abreast of Faroe.
The whole valley was as varied in rock and soil as Eastern England,
with little lakes, ridges of boulder clay, and downs of gorse and
bracken. Northward across this verdant land crept succeeding waves
of the fir, the oak, and the beech.
{43}
Out on the delta coast, far to the right, beyond a deep sea channel,
rose the white Ice-cap of Sweden, whose Ice-flood filled the Norway
fjords with berg-breeding glaciers. Far to the left rose the
ice-clad Grampians.
The Delta people and those of the Baltic Lake were poor savages
living upon shell fish, and making mounds of shell refuse round their
hearths. Inland were stronger peoples who had lake villages or
trenched encampments on headlands of the downs.
[Sidenote: Cloudland horses]
As the grass followed the advancing fir woods, the primitive stock of
Cloudland returned to pastures from whence it had been driven by the
cold. These were not Duns, Bays, or striped, but native Cloudland
horses adapted to this region of little sunshine. Strong Dun was not
needed to guard them from the actinic rays of sunlight, so their dull
colour had yellowish, brownish and reddish tones which blended with
the landscape, such colours as are worn by the Celtic ponies of
Britain and other Atlantic isles.
The wild horses were evolving three utterly different types. On the
chalk downs, and on the limestone tracts north of the Humber, there
were lightly built, slender, graceful horses of fair height. On the
clays there were {44} horses, heavy, coarse, and slow. On the
Breton, British and Scandinavian moors there were Celtic ponies.
[Sidenote: The deluge in Cloudland]
It needed but little sinking of this land to flood the Delta, and
open a long channel up the North River valley. The sea washed out
the clay foundations of the forests. The sea breakers wielded
boulders of the glacier-drift and hurled them like battering rams
against the dissolving limestone of low cliffs. The tide swung
gravels to tear out bays in the foreshores. Winter frosts cracked
the headlands, and summer rains melted the ice cracks so that the
capes fell into the sea in landslides. Thus the sea widened, biting
its way deep into Europe until men began their losing fight with
dykes for the saving of doomed netherlands. The North Sea cut its
way through chalk downs into the English channel. The tribes who
held fortified headlands of the chalk downs and set up temples at
Stonehenge and Avebury on the mainland of Europe, about 1800 B.C.
found that their country had become an island.
The old horse pasture of North-western Europe was split into sundered
provinces by the advancing sea, but the breeds, native to a lost
valley are still almost identical on either shore. The Breton and
British moors have {45} one type of Celtic pony whose ancestral range
extended across the Straits of Dover. The clay fens of Lincolnshire
and of Holland still have draught horses alike in build and in
colour. The limestone districts north of the Humber have the same
tall horses as the similar provinces across the water in Schleswig,
Holstein and Jutland. The granitic lands of Scotland and Norway have
one type of the Celtic pony. (Low's Domesticated Animals.)
It is none of my business, but I cannot help feeling that the
flooding at about the same period of the Lower Yukon and North River
Valleys is something more than a coincidence. The Geological people
are always cocksure that the sea cannot rise, that an hemisphere--the
Southern, for example, cannot be flooded, and they assume quite
blandly that lands have sunk, without explaining why. Their theories
never seem really to fit that mighty wilderness, to which I have seen
them come as visitors or strangers. Science will never understand
until it learns to love.