The preponderance of land in the northern
hemisphere denotes the greater intensity there of the causes of
elevation at a remote geologic epoch: that is all that one can say about
it: but whence that greater intensity? I have some knowledge of the
earth for only ten miles down: but she has eight thousand miles: and
whether through all that depth she is flame or fluid, hard or soft, I do
not know, I do not know. Her method of forming coal, geysers and hot
sulphur-springs, and the jewels, and the atols and coral reefs; the
metamorphic rocks of sedimentary origin, like gneiss, the plutonic and
volcanic rocks, rocks of fusion, and the unstratified masses which
constitute the basis of the crust; and harvests, the burning flame of
flowers, and the passage from the vegetable to the animal: I do not know
them, but they are of her, and they are like me, molten in the same
furnace of her fiery heart. She is dark and moody, sudden and ill-fated,
and rends her young like a cannibal lioness; and she is old and wise,
and remembers Hur of the Chaldees which Uruk built, and that Temple of
Bel which rose in seven pyramids to symbolise the planets, and
Birs-i-Nimrud, and Haran, and she bears still, as a thing of yesterday,
old Persepolis and the tomb of Cyrus, and those cloister-like
viharah-temples of the ancient Buddhists, cut from the Himalayan rock;
and returning from the Far East, I stopped at Ismailia, and so to Cairo,
and saw where Memphis was, and stood one bright midnight before that
great pyramid of Shafra, and that dumb Sphynx, and, seated at the well
of one of the rock-tombs, looked till tears of pity streamed down my
cheeks: for great is the earth, and her Ages, but man 'passeth away.
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