Madam How and Lady Why; Or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children. Charles Kingsley

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      CHAPTER III—VOLCANOS

      You want to know why the Spaniards in Peru and Ecuador should have expected an earthquake.

      Because they had had so many already.  The shaking of the ground in their country had gone on perpetually, till they had almost ceased to care about it, always hoping that no very heavy shock would come; and being, now and then, terribly mistaken.

      For instance, in the province of Quito, in the year 1797, from thirty to forty thousand people were killed at once by an earthquake.  One would have thought that warning enough: but the warning was not taken: and now, this very year, thousands more have been killed in the very same country, in the very same way.

      They might have expected as much.  For their towns are built, most of them, close to volcanos—some of the highest and most terrible in the world.  And wherever there are volcanos there will be earthquakes.  You may have earthquakes without volcanos, now and then; but volcanos without earthquakes, seldom or never.

      How does that come to pass?  Does a volcano make earthquakes?  No; we may rather say that earthquakes are trying to make volcanos.  For volcanos are the holes which the steam underground has burst open that it may escape into the air above.  They are the chimneys of the great blast-furnaces underground, in which Madam How pounds and melts up the old rocks, to make them into new ones, and spread them out over the land above.

      And are there many volcanos in the world?  You have heard of Vesuvius, of course, in Italy; and Etna, in Sicily; and Hecla, in Iceland.  And you have heard, too, of Kilauea, in the Sandwich Islands, and of Pele’s Hair—the yellow threads of lava, like fine spun glass, which are blown from off its pools of fire, and which the Sandwich Islanders believed to be the hair of a goddess who lived in the crater;—and you have read, too, I hope, in Miss Yonge’s Book of Golden Deeds, the noble story of the Christian chieftainess who, in order to persuade her subjects to become Christians also, went down into the crater and defied the goddess of the volcano, and came back unhurt and triumphant.

      But if you look at the map, you will see that there are many, many more.  Get Keith Johnston’s Physical Atlas from the schoolroom—of course it is there (for a schoolroom without a physical atlas is like a needle without an eye)—and look at the map which is called “Phenomena of Volcanic Action.”

      You will see in it many red dots, which mark the volcanos which are still burning: and black dots, which mark those which have been burning at some time or other, not very long ago, scattered about the world.  Sometimes they are single, like the red dot at Otaheite, or at Easter Island in the Pacific.  Sometimes the are in groups, or clusters, like the cluster at the Sandwich Islands, or in the Friendly Islands, or in New Zealand.  And if we look in the Atlantic, we shall see four clusters: one in poor half-destroyed Iceland, in the far north, one in the Azores, one in the Canaries, and one in the Cape de Verds.  And there is one dot in those Canaries which we must not overlook, for it is no other than the famous Peak of Teneriffe, a volcano which is hardly burnt out yet, and may burn up again any day, standing up out of the sea more than 12,000 feet high still, and once it must have been double that height.  Some think that it is perhaps the true Mount Atlas, which the old Greeks named when first they ventured out of the Straits of Gibraltar down the coast of Africa, and saw the great peak far to the westward, with the clouds cutting off its top; and said that it was a mighty giant, the brother of the Evening Star, who held up the sky upon his shoulders, in the midst of the Fortunate Islands, the gardens of the daughter of the Evening Star, full of strange golden fruits; and that Perseus had turned him into stone, when he passed him with the Gorgon’s Head.

      But you will see, too, that most of these red and black dots run in crooked lines; and that many of the clusters run in lines likewise.

      Look at one line: by far the largest on the earth.  You will learn a good deal of geography from it.

      The red dots begin at a place called the Terribles, on the east side of the Bay of Bengal.  They run on, here and there, along the islands of Sumatra and Java, and through the Spice Islands; and at New Guinea the line of red dots forks.  One branch runs south-east, through islands whose names you never heard, to the Friendly Islands, and to New Zealand.  The other runs north, through the Philippines, through Japan, through Kamschatka; and then there is a little break of sea, between Asia and America: but beyond it, the red dots begin again in the Aleutian Islands, and then turn down the whole west coast of America, down from Mount Elias (in what was, till lately, Russian America) towards British Columbia.  Then, after a long gap, there are one or two in Lower California (and we must not forget the terrible earthquake which has just shaken San Francisco, between those two last places); and when we come down to Mexico we find the red dots again plentiful, and only too plentiful; for they mark the great volcanic line of Mexico, of which you will read, I hope, some day, in Humboldt’s works.  But the line does not stop there.  After the little gap of the Isthmus of Panama, it begins again in Quito, the very country which has just been shaken, and in which stand the huge volcanos Chimborazo, Pasto, Antisana, Cotopaxi, Pichincha, Tunguragua,—smooth cones from 15,000 to 20,000 feet high, shining white with snow, till the heat inside melts it off, and leaves the cinders of which the peaks are made all black and ugly among the clouds, ready to burst in smoke and fire.  South of them again, there is a long gap, and then another line of red dots—Arequiba, Chipicani, Gualatieri, Atacama,—as high as, or higher than those in Quito; and this, remember, is the other country which has just been shaken.  On the sea-shore below those volcanos stood the hapless city of Arica, whose ruins we saw in the picture.  Then comes another gap; and then a line of more volcanos in Chili, at the foot of which happened that fearful earthquake of 1835 (besides many more) of which you will read some day in that noble СКАЧАТЬ