So? You have been looking at that beautiful drawing of the ruin of Arica
in the _Illustrated London News_: and it has puzzled you and made you
sad. You want to know why God killed all those people--mothers among
them, too, and little children?
Alas, my dear child! who am I that I should answer you that?
Have you done wrong in asking me? No, my dear child; no. You have asked
me because you are a human being and a child of God, and not merely a
cleverer sort of animal, an ape who can read and write and cast accounts.
Therefore it is that you cannot be content, and ought not to be content,
with asking how things happen, but must go on to ask why. You cannot be
content with knowing the causes of things; and if you knew all the
natural science that ever was or ever will be known to men, that would
not satisfy you; for it would only tell you the _causes_ of things, while
your souls want to know the _reasons_ of things besides; and though I may
not be able to tell you the reasons of things, or show you aught but a
tiny glimpse here and there of that which I called the other day the
glory of Lady Why, yet I believe that somehow, somewhen, somewhere, you
will learn something of the reason of things. For that thirst to know
_why_ was put into the hearts of little children by God Himself; and I
believe that God would never have given them that thirst if He had not
meant to satisfy it.
There--you do not understand me. I trust that you will understand me
some day. Meanwhile, I think--I only say I _think_--you know I told you
how humble we must be whenever we speak of Lady Why--that we may guess at
something like a good reason for the terrible earthquakes in South
America. I do not wish to be hard upon poor people in great affliction:
but I cannot help thinking that they have been doing for hundreds of
years past something very like what the Bible calls "tempting
God"--staking their property and their lives upon the chances of no
earthquakes coming, while they ought to have known that an earthquake
might come any day. They have fulfilled (and little thought I that it
would be fulfilled so soon) the parable that I told you once, of the
nation of the Do-as-you-likes, who lived careless and happy at the foot
of the burning mountain, and would not be warned by the smoke that came
out of the top, or by the slag and cinders which lay all about them; till
the mountain blew up, and destroyed them miserably.
Then I think that they ought to have expected an earthquake.
Well--it is not for us to judge any one, especially if they live in a
part of the world in which we have not been ourselves. But I think that
we know, and that they ought to have known, enough about earthquakes to
have been more prudent than they have been for many a year. At least we
will hope that, though they would not learn their lesson till this year,
they will learn it now, and will listen to the message which I think
Madam How has brought them, spoken in a voice of thunder, and written in
letters of flame.
And what is that?
My dear child, if the landlord of our house was in the habit of pulling
the roof down upon our heads, and putting gunpowder under the foundations
to blow us up, do you not think we should know what he meant, even though
he never spoke a word? He would be very wrong in behaving so, of course:
but one thing would be certain,--that he did not intend us to live in his
house any longer if he could help it; and was giving us, in a very rough
fashion, notice to quit. And so it seems to me that these poor Spanish
Americans have received from the Landlord of all landlords, who can do no
wrong, such a notice to quit as perhaps no people ever had before; which
says to them in unmistakable words, "You must leave this country: or
perish." And I believe that that message, like all Lady Why's messages,
is at heart a merciful and loving one; that if these Spaniards would
leave the western coast of Peru, and cross the Andes into the green
forests of the eastern side of their own land, they might not only live
free from earthquakes, but (if they would only be good and industrious)
become a great, rich, and happy nation, instead of the idle, and useless,
and I am afraid not over good, people which they have been. For in that
eastern part of their own land God's gifts are waiting for them, in a
paradise such as I can neither describe nor you conceive;--precious
woods, fruits, drugs, and what not--boundless wealth, in one word--waiting
for them to send it all down the waters of the mighty river Amazon,
enriching us here in the Old World, and enriching themselves there in the
New. If they would only go and use these gifts of God, instead of
neglecting them as they have been doing for now three hundred years, they
would be a blessing to the earth, instead of being--that which they have
been.
God grant, my dear child, that these poor people may take the warning
that has been sent to them; "The voice of God revealed in facts," as the
great Lord Bacon would have called it, and see not only that God has
bidden them leave the place where they are now, but has prepared for
them, in their own land, a home a thousand times better than that in
which they now live.
But you ask, How ought they to have known that an earthquake would come?
Well, to make you understand that, we must talk a little about
earthquakes, and what makes them; and in order to find out that, let us
try the very simplest cause of which we can think. That is the wise and
scientific plan.
Now, whatever makes these earthquakes must be enormously strong; that is
certain. And what is the strongest thing you know of in the world? Think
. . .
Gunpowder?
Well, gunpowder is strong sometimes: but not always. You may carry it in
a flask, or in your hand, and then it is weak enough. It only becomes
strong by being turned into gas and steam. But steam is always strong.
And if you look at a railway engine, still more if you had ever
seen--which God forbid you should--a boiler explosion, you would agree
with me, that the strongest thing we know of in the world is steam.
Now I think that we can explain almost, if not quite, all that we know
about earthquakes, if we believe that on the whole they are caused by
steam and other gases expanding, that is, spreading out, with wonderful
quickness and strength. Of course there must be something to make them
expand, and that is _heat_. But we will not talk of that yet.
Now do you remember that riddle which I put to you the other day?--"What
had the rattling of the lid of the kettle to do with Hartford Bridge Flat
being lifted out of the ancient sea?"
The answer to the riddle, I believe, is--Steam has done both. The lid of
the kettle rattles, because the expanding steam escapes in little jets,
and so causes a _lid-quake_. Now suppose that there was steam under the
earth trying to escape, and the earth in one place was loose and yet
hard, as the lid of the kettle is loose and yet hard, with cracks in it,
it may be, like the crack between the edge of the lid and the edge of the
kettle itself: might not the steam try to escape through the cracks, and
rattle the surface of the earth, and so cause an _earthquake_?
So the steam would escape generally easily, and would only make a passing
rattle, like the earthquake of which the famous jester Charles Selwyn
said that it was quite a young one, so tame that you might have stroked
it; like that which I myself once felt in the Pyrenees, which gave me
very solemn thoughts after a while, though at first I did nothing but
laugh at it; and I will tell you why.
I was travelling in the Pyrenees; and I came one evening to the loveliest
spot--a glen, or rather a vast crack in the mountains, so narrow that
there was no room for anything at the bottom of it, save a torrent
roaring between walls of polished rock. High above the torrent the road
was cut out among the cliffs, and above the road rose more cliffs, with
great black cavern mouths, hundreds of feet above our heads, out of each
of which poured in foaming waterfalls streams large enough to turn a
mill, and above them mountains piled on mountains, all covered with woods
of box, which smelt rich and hot and musky in the warm spring air. Among
the box-trees and fallen boulders grew hepaticas, blue and white and red,
such as you see in the garden; and little stars of gentian, more azure
than the azure sky. But out of the box-woods above rose giant silver
firs, clothing the cliffs and glens with tall black spires, till they
stood out at last in a jagged saw-edge against the purple evening sky,
along the mountain ranges, thousands of feet aloft; and beyond them
again, at the head of the valley, rose vast cones of virgin snow, miles
away in reality, but looking so brilliant and so near that one fancied at
the first moment that one could have touched them with one's hand. Snow-
white they stood, the glorious things, seven thousand feet into the air;
and I watched their beautiful white sides turn rose-colour in the evening
sun, and when he set, fade into dull cold gray, till the bright moon came
out to light them up once more. When I was tired of wondering and
admiring, I went into bed; and there I had a dream--such a dream as Alice
had when she went into Wonderland--such a dream as I dare say you may
have had ere now. Some noise or stir puts into your fancy as you sleep a
whole long dream to account for it; and yet that dream, which seems to
you to be hours long, has not taken up a second of time; for the very
same noise which begins the dream, wakes you at the end of it: and so it
was with me. I dreamed that some English people had come into the hotel
where I was, and were sleeping in the room underneath me; and that they
had quarrelled and fought, and broke their bed down with a tremendous
crash, and that I must get up, and stop the fight; and at that moment I
woke and heard coming up the valley from the north such a roar as I never
heard before or since; as if a hundred railway trains were rolling
underground; and just as it passed under my bed there was a tremendous
thump, and I jumped out of bed quicker than I ever did in my life, and
heard the roaring sound die away as it rolled up the valley towards the
peaks of snow. Still I had in my head this notion of the Englishmen
fighting in the room below. But then I recollected that no Englishmen
had come in the night before, and that I had been in the room below, and
that there was no bed in it. Then I opened my window--a woman screamed,
a dog barked, some cocks and hens cackled in a very disturbed humour, and
then I could hear nothing but the roaring of the torrent a hundred feet
below. And then it flashed across me what all the noise was about; and I
burst out laughing and said "It is only an earthquake," and went to bed
Next morning I inquired whether any one had heard a noise. No, nobody
had heard anything. And the driver who had brought me up the valley only
winked, but did not choose to speak. At last at breakfast I asked the
pretty little maid who waited what was the meaning of the noise I heard
in the night, and she answered, to my intense amusement, "Ah! bah! ce
n'etait qu'un tremblement de terre; il y en a ici toutes les six
semaines." Now the secret was out. The little maid, I found, came from
the lowland far away, and did not mind telling the truth: but the good
people of the place were afraid to let out that they had earthquakes
every six weeks, for fear of frightening visitors away: and because they
were really very good people, and very kind to me, I shall not tell you
what the name of the place is.
Of course after that I could do no less than ask Madam How, very civilly,
how she made earthquakes in that particular place, hundreds of miles away
from any burning mountain? And this was the answer I _thought_ she gave,
though I am not so conceited as to say I am sure.
As I had come up the valley I had seen that the cliffs were all beautiful
gray limestone marble; but just at this place they were replaced by
granite, such as you may see in London Bridge or at Aberdeen. I do not
mean that the limestone changed to granite, but that the granite had
risen up out of the bottom of the valley, and had carried the limestone
(I suppose) up on its back hundreds of feet into the air. Those caves
with the waterfalls pouring from their mouths were all on one level, at
the top of the granite, and the bottom of the limestone. That was to be
expected; for, as I will explain to you some day, water can make caves
easily in limestone: but never, I think, in granite. But I knew that
besides these cold springs which came out of the caves, there were hot
springs also, full of curious chemical salts, just below the very house
where I was in. And when I went to look at them, I found that they came
out of the rock just where the limestone and the granite joined. "Ah," I
said, "now I think I have Madam How's answer. The lid of one of her
great steam boilers is rather shaky and cracked just here, because the
granite has broken and torn the limestone as it lifted it up; and here is
the hot water out of the boiler actually oozing out of the crack; and the
earthquake I heard last night was simply the steam rumbling and thumping
inside, and trying to get out."
And then, my dear child, I fell into a more serious mood. I said to
myself, "If that stream had been a little, only a little stronger, or if
the rock above it had been only a little weaker, it would have been no
laughing matter then; the village might have been shaken to the ground;
the rocks hurled into the torrent; jets of steam and of hot water, mixed,
it may be, with deadly gases, have roared out of the riven ground; that
might have happened here, in short, which has happened and happens still
in a hundred places in the world, whenever the rocks are too weak to
stand the pressure of the steam below, and the solid earth bursts as an
engine boiler bursts when the steam within it is too strong." And when
those thoughts came into my mind, I was in no humour to jest any more
about "young earthquakes," or "Madam How's boilers;" but rather to say
with the wise man of old, "It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not
consumed."
Most strange, most terrible also, are the tricks which this underground
steam plays. It will make the ground, which seems to us so hard and
firm, roll and rock in waves, till people are sea-sick, as on board a
ship; and that rocking motion (which is the most common) will often, when
it is but slight, set the bells ringing in the steeples, or make the
furniture, and things on shelves, jump about quaintly enough. It will
make trees bend to and fro, as if a wind was blowing through them; open
doors suddenly, and shut them again with a slam; make the timbers of the
floors and roofs creak, as they do in a ship at sea; or give men such
frights as one of the dock-keepers at Liverpool got in the earthquake in
1863, when his watchbox rocked so, that he thought some one was going to
pitch him over into the dock. But these are only little hints and
warnings of what it can do. When it is strong enough, it will rock down
houses and churches into heaps of ruins, or, if it leaves them standing,
crack them from top to bottom, so that they must be pulled down and
rebuilt.
You saw those pictures of the ruins of Arica, about which our talk began;
and from them you can guess well enough for yourself what a town looks
like which has been ruined by an earthquake. Of the misery and the
horror which follow such a ruin I will not talk to you, nor darken your
young spirit with sad thoughts which grown people must face, and ought to
face. But the strangeness of some of the tricks which the earthquake
shocks play is hardly to be explained, even by scientific men. Sometimes,
it would seem, the force runs round, making the solid ground eddy, as
water eddies in a brook. For it will make straight rows of trees
crooked; it will twist whole walls round--or rather the ground on which
the walls stand--without throwing them down; it will shift the stones of
a pillar one on the other sideways, as if a giant had been trying to spin
it like a teetotum, and so screwed it half in pieces. There is a story
told by a wise man, who saw the place himself, of the whole furniture of
one house being hurled away by an earthquake, and buried under the ruins
of another house; and of things carried hundreds of yards off, so that
the neighbours went to law to settle who was the true owner of them.
Sometimes, again, the shock seems to come neither horizontally in waves,
nor circularly in eddies, but vertically, that is, straight up from
below; and then things--and people, alas! sometimes--are thrown up off
the earth high into the air, just as things spring up off the table if
you strike it smartly enough underneath. By that same law (for there is
a law for every sort of motion) it is that the earthquake shock sometimes
hurls great rocks off a cliff into the valley below. The shock runs
through the mountain till it comes to the cliff at the end of it; and
then the face of the cliff, if it be at all loose, flies off into the
air. You may see the very same thing happen, if you will put marbles or
billiard-balls in a row touching each other, and strike the one nearest
you smartly in the line of the row. All the balls stand still, except
the last one, and that flies off. The shock, like the earthquake shock,
has run through them all; but only the end one, which had nothing beyond
it but soft air, has been moved; and when you grow old, and learn
mathematics, you will know the law of motion according to which that
happens, and learn to apply what the billiard-balls have taught you, to
explain the wonders of an earthquake. For in this case, as in so many
more, you must watch Madam How at work on little and common things, to
find out how she works in great and rare ones. That is why Solomon says
that "a fool's eyes are in the ends of the earth," because he is always
looking out for strange things which he has not seen, and which he could
not understand if he saw; instead of looking at the petty commonplace
matters which are about his feet all day long, and getting from them
sound knowledge, and the art of getting more sound knowledge still.
Another terrible destruction which the earthquake brings, when it is
close to the seaside, is the wash of a great sea wave, such as swept in
last year upon the island of St. Thomas, in the West Indies; such as
swept in upon the coast of Peru this year. The sea moans, and sinks
back, leaving the shore dry; and then comes in from the offing a mighty
wall of water, as high as, or higher than, many a tall house; sweeps far
inland, washing away quays and houses, and carrying great ships in with
it; and then sweeps back again, leaving the ships high and dry, as ships
were left in Peru this year.
Now, how is that wave made? Let us think. Perhaps in many ways. But
two of them I will tell you as simply as I can, because they seem the
most likely, and probably the most common.
Suppose, as the earthquake shock ran on, making the earth under the sea
heave and fall in long earth-waves, the sea-bottom sank down. Then the
water on it would sink down too, and leave the shore dry; till the sea-
bottom rose again, and hurled the water up again against the land. This
is one way of explaining it, and it may be true. For certain it is, that
earthquakes do move the bottom of the sea; and certain, too, that they
move the water of the sea also, and with tremendous force. For ships at
sea during an earthquake feel such a blow from it (though it does them no
harm) that the sailors often rush upon deck fancying that they have
struck upon a rock; and the force which could give a ship, floating in
water, such a blow as that, would be strong enough to hurl thousands of
tons of water up the beach, and on to the land.
But there is another way of accounting for this great sea wave, which I
fancy comes true sometimes.
Suppose you put an empty india-rubber ball into water, and then blow into
it through a pipe. Of course, you know, as the ball filled, the upper
side of it would rise out of the water. Now, suppose there were a party
of little ants moving about upon that ball, and fancying it a great
island, or perhaps the whole world--what would they think of the ball's
filling and growing bigger?
If they could see the sides of the basin or tub in which the ball was,
and were sure that they did not move, then they would soon judge by them
that they themselves were moving, and that the ball was rising out of the
water. But if the ants were so short-sighted that they could not see the
sides of the basin, they would be apt to make a mistake, because they
would then be like men on an island out of sight of any other land. Then
it would be impossible further to tell whether they were moving up, or
whether the water was moving down; whether their ball was rising out of
the water, or the water was sinking away from the ball. They would
probably say, "The water is sinking and leaving the ball dry."
Do you understand that? Then think what would happen if you pricked a
hole in the ball. The air inside would come hissing out, and the ball
would sink again into the water. But the ants would probably fancy the
very opposite. Their little heads would be full of the notion that the
ball was solid and could not move, just as our heads are full of the
notion that the earth is solid and cannot move; and they would say, "Ah!
here is the water rising again." Just so, I believe, when the sea seems
to ebb away during the earthquake, the land is really being raised out of
the sea, hundreds of miles of coast, perhaps, or a whole island, at once,
by the force of the steam and gas imprisoned under the ground. That
steam stretches and strains the solid rocks below, till they can bear no
more, and snap, and crack, with frightful roar and clang; then out of
holes and chasms in the ground rush steam, gases--often foul and
poisonous ones--hot water, mud, flame, strange stones--all signs that the
great boiler down below has burst at last.
Then the strain is eased. The earth sinks together again, as the ball
did when it was pricked; and sinks lower, perhaps, than it was before:
and back rushes the sea, which the earth had thrust away while it rose,
and sweeps in, destroying all before it.
Of course, there is a great deal more to be said about all this: but I
have no time to tell you now. You will read it, I hope, for yourselves
when you grow up, in the writings of far wiser men than I. Or perhaps
you may feel for yourselves in foreign lands the actual shock of a great
earthquake, or see its work fresh done around you. And if ever that
happens, and you be preserved during the danger, you will learn for
yourself, I trust, more about earthquakes than I can teach you, if you
will only bear in mind the simple general rules for understanding the
"how" of them which I have given you here.
But you do not seem satisfied yet? What is it that you want to know?
Oh! There was an earthquake here in England the other night, while you
were asleep; and that seems to you too near to be pleasant. Will there
ever be earthquakes in England which will throw houses down, and bury
people in the ruins?
My dear child, I think you may set your heart at rest upon that point. As
far as the history of England goes back, and that is more than a thousand
years, there is no account of any earthquake which has done any serious
damage, or killed, I believe, a single human being. The little
earthquakes which are sometimes felt in England run generally up one line
of country, from Devonshire through Wales, and up the Severn valley into
Cheshire and Lancashire, and the south-west of Scotland; and they are
felt more smartly there, I believe, because the rocks are harder there
than here, and more tossed about by earthquakes which happened ages and
ages ago, long before man lived on the earth. I will show you the work
of these earthquakes some day, in the tilting and twisting of the layers
of rock, and in the cracks (faults, as they are called) which run through
them in different directions. I showed you some once, if you recollect,
in the chalk cliff at Ramsgate--two set of cracks, sloping opposite ways,
which I told you were made by two separate sets of earthquakes, long,
long ago, perhaps while the chalk was still at the bottom of a deep sea.
But even in the rocky parts of England the earthquake-force seems to have
all but died out. Perhaps the crust of the earth has become too thick
and solid there to be much shaken by the gases and steam below. In this
eastern part of England, meanwhile, there is but little chance that an
earthquake will ever do much harm, because the ground here, for thousands
of feet down, is not hard and rocky, but soft--sands, clays, chalk, and
sands again; clays, soft limestones, and clays again--which all act as
buffers to deaden the earthquake shocks, and deaden too the earthquake
noise.
And how?
Put your ear to one end of a soft bolster, and let some one hit the other
end. You will hear hardly any noise, and will not feel the blow at all.
Put your ear to one end of a hard piece of wood, and let some one hit the
other. You will hear a smart tap; and perhaps feel a smart tap, too.
When you are older, and learn the laws of sound, and of motion among the
particles of bodies, you will know why. Meanwhile you may comfort
yourself with the thought that Madam How has (doubtless by command of
Lady Why) prepared a safe soft bed for this good people of Britain--not
that they may lie and sleep on it, but work and till, plant and build and
manufacture, and thrive in peace and comfort, we will trust and pray, for
many a hundred years to come. All that the steam inside the earth is
likely to do to us, is to raise parts of this island (as Hartford Bridge
Flats were raised, ages ago, out of the old icy sea) so slowly, probably,
that no man can tell whether they are rising or not. Or again, the steam-
power may be even now dying out under our island, and letting parts of it
sink slowly into the sea, as some wise friends of mine think that the
fens in Norfolk and Cambridgeshire are sinking now. I have shown you
where that kind of work has gone on in Norfolk; how the brow of
Sandringham Hill was once a sea-cliff, and Dersingham Bog at its foot a
shallow sea; and therefore that the land has risen there. How, again, at
Hunstanton Station there is a beach of sea-shells twenty feet above high-
water mark, showing that the land has risen there likewise. And how,
farther north again, at Brancaster, there are forests of oak, and fir,
and alder, with their roots still in the soil, far below high-water mark,
and only uncovered at low tide; which is a plain sign that there the land
has sunk. You surely recollect the sunken forest at Brancaster, and the
beautiful shells we picked up in its gullies, and the millions of live
Pholases boring into the clay and peat which once was firm dry land, fed
over by giant oxen, and giant stags likewise, and perhaps by the mammoth
himself, the great woolly elephant whose teeth the fishermen dredge up in
the sea outside? You recollect that? Then remember that as that Norfolk
shore has changed, so slowly but surely is the whole world changing
around us. Hartford Bridge Flat here, for instance, how has it changed!
Ages ago it was the gravelly bottom of a sea. Then the steam-power
underground raised it up slowly, through long ages, till it became dry
land. And ages hence, perhaps, it will have become a sea-bottom once
more. Washed slowly by the rain, or sunk by the dying out of the steam-
power underground, it will go down again to the place from whence it
came. Seas will roll where we stand now, and new lands will rise where
seas now roll. For all things on this earth, from the tiniest flower to
the tallest mountain, change and change all day long. Every atom of
matter moves perpetually; and nothing "continues in one stay." The solid-
seeming earth on which you stand is but a heaving bubble, bursting ever
and anon in this place and in that. Only above all, and through all, and
with all, is One who does not move nor change, but is the same yesterday,
to-day, and for ever. And on Him, my child, and not on this bubble of an
earth, do you and I, and all mankind, depend.
But I have not yet told you why the Peruvians ought to have expected an
earthquake. True. I will tell you another time.