The transformation of landscape by moisture is no matter of appearance
only, no mere optical illusion or effect of liquid stained glass. It
is a sort of echo or symbol to our senses of very serious events in
prehistoric times. Water, which now seems only to lap the earth or to
cloud it, was the chisel which originally carved its surface. They say
that when the planet, recently thrown off from the sun, was still on
fire, the lighter elements rose in the form of gases around the molten
metallic core; and the outer parts of this nucleus in cooling formed
a crust of igneous rock which, as the earth contracted, was crushed
together and wrinkled like the skin of a raisin. These wrinkles are
our mountain chains, made even more rugged and villainous by belated
eruptions. On that early earth there was no water. All was sheer peaks,
ledges, and chasms, red-hot or coal-black, or of such livid metallic
hues, crimson, saffron, and purple, as may still be seen on the shores
of the Dead Sea or in the Grand Canyon of the Colorado--rifts that
allow us to peep into the infernal regions, happily in those places
at least without inhabitants. This hellish sort of landscape, which
we must now plunge into the depths to find, was the first general
landscape of earth.
As the cooling progressed, however, the steam that was in the upper
atmosphere began to condense and to fall in rain. At first the hot
drops no doubt sizzled as they fell and rose again immediately in
vapour, yet the meteorological cycle was established notwithstanding.
The rain that evaporated descended once more, each time colder and
more abundant, until it cut channels amongst the crags, ground and
polished their fragments into boulders and pebbles, formed pools in the
hollows, and finally covered the earth up to its chin with the oceans.
Much detritus meantime was washed down from the rocks; it gathered in
crevices and along the pockets and slacker reaches of rivers. This
sediment was soaked with moisture and mixed with dissolved acids; it
became the first soft layer of earth and finally a fertile soil. Water
in this way softened the outlines of the mountains, laid the floor of
the valleys, and made a leafy and a cloudy place of the planet.
The sages (and some of them much more recent than Thales) tell us
that water not only wears away the rocks, but has a singular power of
carrying away their subtler elements in solution, especially carbonic
acid, of which the atmosphere also is full; and it happens that
these elements can combine with the volatile dements of water into
innumerable highly complex substances, all of which the atmospheric
cycle carries with it wherever it goes; and with these complex
substances, which are the requisite materials for living bodies, it
everywhere fills the sea and impregnates the land.
Even if life, then, is not actually born of the moist element, it is at
least suckled by it; the water-laden atmosphere is the wet nurse, if
not the mother, of the earth-soul. The earth has its soul outside its
body, as many a philosopher would have wished to have his. The winds
that play about it are its breath, the water that rains down and rises
again in mist is its circulating blood; and the death of the earth will
come when some day it sucks in the atmosphere and the sea, gets its
soul inside its body again, turns its animating gases back into solids,
and becomes altogether a skeleton of stone.
No wonder that living creatures find things that are fluid and immersed
in moisture friendly to the watery core of their own being. Seeds,
blood, and tears are liquid; nothing else is so poignant as what passes
and flows, like music and love; and if this irreparable fluidity is
sad, anything stark and arrested is still sadder. Life is compelled to
flow, and things must either flow with it or, like Lot's wife, in the
petrified gesture of refusal, remain to mock their own hope.
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