Books: Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel

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"Arriving at last at the extremity of the island"--

We have seen that the bridge Bifrost was connected with the extremity
of Asgard--

"they beheld a smooth and narrow arm of the sea, and beyond it a vast
and apparently boundless country," (Europe?) "_connected with their
island by a narrow and rocky pathway, arising from the bosom of the
waters_."

This is probably a precise description of the connecting ridge; it
united the boundless continent, Europe, with

{p. 384}

the island; it rose out of the sea, it was rocky; it was the broken
crest of a submerged mountain-chain.

What became of it? Here again we have a tradition of its destruction.
We read that, after Adima and Héva had passed over this rocky bridge--

"No sooner did they touch the shore, than trees, flowers, fruit,
birds, all that they had seen from the opposite side, vanished in an
instant, _amidst terrible clamor; the rocks by which they had crossed
sank beneath the waves_, a few sharp peaks alone remaining above the
surface, to indicate the place of the bridge, _which had been
destroyed by divine displeasure_."

Here we have the crushing and instant destruction by the Drift, the
terrific clamor of the age of chaos, and the breaking down of the
bridge Bifrost under the feet of the advancing armies of Muspel; here
we have "the earth" of Ovid "settling down a little" in the ocean;
here we have the legends of the Cornishmen of the lost land,
described in the poetry of Tennyson; here we have the emigrants to
Europe cut off from their primeval home, and left in a land of stones
and clay and thistles.

It is, of course, localized in Ceylon, precisely as the mountain of
Ararat and the mountain of Olympus crop out in a score of places,
wherever the races carried their legends. And to this day the Hindoo
points to the rocks which rise in the Indian Ocean, between the
eastern point of India and the Island of Ceylon, as the remnants of
the Bridge; and the reader will find them marked on our maps as"
Adam's Bridge" (_Palam Adima_). The people even point out, to this
day, a high mountain, from whose foot the Bridge went forth, over
which Adima and Héva, crossed to the continent; and it is known in
modern geography as "Adam's Peak." So vividly have the traditions of
a vast antiquity come down to us! The legends

{p. 385}

of the Drift have left their stamp even in our schoolbooks.

And the memory of this Bridge survives not only in our geographies,
but in our religions.

Man reasons, at first, from below upward; from godlike men up to
man-like gods; from Cæsar, the soldier, up to Cæsar, the deity.

Heaven was, in the beginning, a heavenly city on earth; it is
transported to the clouds; and there its golden streets and sparkling
palaces await the redeemed.

This is natural: we can only conceive of the best of the spiritual by
the best we know of the material; we can imagine no musical
instrument in the bands of the angels superior to a harp; no weapon
better than a sword for the grasp of Gabriel.

This disproves not a spiritual and superior state; it simply shows
the poverty and paucity of our poor intellectual apparatus, which,
like a mirror, reflects only that which is around it, and reflects it
imperfectly.

Men sometimes think they are mocking spiritual things when it is the
imperfection of material nature, (which they set so much store by,)
that provokes their ridicule.

So, among all the races which went out from this heavenly land, this
land of high intelligence, this land of the master race, it was
remembered down through the ages, and dwelt upon and sung of until it
moved upward from the waters of the Atlantic to the distant skies,
and became a spiritual heaven. And the ridges which so strangely
connected it with the continents, east and west, became the bridges
over which the souls of men must pass to go from earth to heaven.

For instance:

The Persians believe in this bridge between earth and

{p. 386}

paradise. In his prayers the penitent in his confession says to this
day:

"I am wholly without doubt in the existence of the Mazdayaçnian
faith; in the coming of the resurrection of the latter body; in the
stepping _over the bridge Chinvat_; as well as in the continuance of
paradise."

The bridge and the land are both indestructible.

Over the midst of the Moslem hell stretches the bridge Es-Sirat,
"finer than a hair and sharper than the edge of a sword."

In the Lyke-Wake Dirge of the English north-country, they sang of

The Brig of Dread
Na braider than a thread."

In Borneo the passage for souls to heaven is across a long tree; it
is scarcely practicable to any except those who have killed a man.

In Burmah, among the Karens, they tie strings across the rivers, for
the ghosts of the dead to pass over to their graves.

In Java, a bridge leads across the abyss to the dwelling-place of the
gods; the evil-doers fall into the depths _below_.

Among the Esquimaux the soul crosses an awful gulf over a stretched
rope, until it reaches the abode of "the great female evil spirit
below" (beyond?) "the sea."

The Ojibways cross to paradise on a great snake, which serves as a
bridge.

The Choctaw bridge is a slippery pine-log.

The South American Manacicas cross on a wooden bridge.

Among many of the American tribes, the Milky Way is the bridge to the
other world.

[1. Poor, "Sanskrit Literature," p. 151.]

{p. 387}

The Polynesians have no bridge; they pass the chasm in canoes.

The Vedic Yama of the Hindoos crossed the rapid waters, and showed
the way to our Aryan fathers.

The modern Hindoo hopes to get through by holding on to the cow's
tail!

Even the African tribes, the Guinea negroes, believe that the land of
souls can only be reached by crossing a river.

Among some of the North American tribes "the souls come to a great
lake," (the ocean,) "where there is a _beautiful island_, toward
which they have to paddle in a canoe of white stone. On the way there
arises a storm, and the wicked souls are wrecked, and the heaps of
their bones are to be seen under the water, but the good reach the
happy _island_."[1]

The Slavs believed in a pathway or road which led to the other world;
it was both the rainbow (as in the Gothic legends) and the Milky Way;
and, since the journey was long, they put boots into the coffin, (for
it was made on foot,) and coins to pay the ferrying across a wide
sea, even as the Greeks expected to be carried over the Styx by
Charon. This abode of the dead, at the end of this long pathway, was
_an island_, a warm, fertile land, called _Buyau_.[2]

In their effort to restore the dead men to the happy island-home, the
heavenly land, beyond the water, the Norsemen actually set their dead
heroes afloat in boats on the open ocean.[3]

Subsequently they raised a great mound over boat, warrior, horses,
weapons, and all. These boats are now being dug up in the north of
Europe and placed in the

[1. Tylor's "Early Mankind," p. 362.

2. Poor, "Sanskrit and Kindred Literatures," pp. 3 71, 372.

3. Ibid.]

{p. 388}

great museums. They tell a marvelous religious and historical story.

I think the unprejudiced reader will agree with me that these legends
show that some Atlantic island played an important part in the very
beginning of human history. It was the great land of the world before
the Drift; it continued to be the great land of the world between the
Drift and the Deluge. Here man fell; here he survived; here he
renewed the race, and from this center he repopulated the world.

We see also that this island was connected with the continents east
and west by great ridges of land.

The deep-sea soundings show that the vast bulk of land, of which the
Azores are the outcroppings, are so connected yet with such ridges,
although their crests are below the sea-level; and we know of no
other island-mass of the Atlantic that is so united with the
continents on both sides of it.

Is not the conclusion very strong that Atlantis was the island-home
of the race, in whose cave Job dwelt; on whose shores Phaëton fell;
on whose fields Adam lived; on whose plain Sodom and Gomorrah stood,
and Odin and Thor and Citli died; from which the Quiches and the
Aztecs wandered to America; the center of all the races; the root of
all the mythologies?

{p. 389}

CHAPTER IV.

OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED.

LET ME consider, briefly, those objections to my theory which have
probably presented themsevles {_sic_} to some of my readers.

First, it may be said:

"We don't understand you. You argue that there could not have been
such an ice-age as the glacialists affirm, and yet you speak of a
period of cold and ice and snow."

True: 'but there is a great difference between such a climate as that
of Scotland, damp and cold, snowy and blowy, and a continental
ice-sheet, a mile or two thick, reaching from John o' Groat's House
to the Mediterranean. We can see that the oranges of Spain can grow
to-day within a comparatively short distance of Edinburgh; but we can
not realize that any tropical or semitropical plant could have
survived in Africa when a precipice of ice, five thousand feet high,
frowned on the coast of Italy; or that any form of life could have
survived on earth when the equator in South America was covered with
a continental ice-sheet a mile in thickness, or even ten feet in
thickness. We can conceive of a glacial age of snow-storms, rains,
hail, and wind--a terribly trying and disagreeable climate for man
and beast--but we can not believe that the whole world was once in
the condition that the dead waste of ice-covered Greenland is in now.

{p. 390}

Secondly, it may be said--

"The whole world is now agreed that ice produced the Drift; what
right, then, has any one man to set up a different theory against the
opinions of mankind? "

One man, Mohammed said, with God on his side, is a majority; and one
man, with the truth on his side, must become a majority.

All recognized truths once rested, solitary and alone, in some one
brain.

Truth is born an acorn, not an oak.

The Rev. Sydney Smith once said that there was a kind of men into
whom you could not introduce a new idea without a surgical operation.
He might have added that, when you had once forced an idea into the
head of such a man, you could not deliver him of it without
instruments.

The conservatism of unthinkingness is one of the potential forces of
the world. It lies athwart the progress of mankind like a colossal
mountain-chain, chilling the atmosphere on both sides of it for a
thousand miles. The Hannibal who would reach the eternal city of
Truth on the other side of these Alps must fight his way over ice and
hew his way through rocks.

The world was once agreed that the Drift was due to the Deluge. It
abandoned this theory, and then became equally certain that it came
from icebergs. This theory was, in turn, given up, and mankind were
then positive that glaciers caused the Drift. But the glaciers were
found to be inadequate for the emergency; and so the continents were
lifted up fifteen hundred feet, and the ice-sheets were introduced.
And now we wait to hear that the immense ice-masses of the Himalayas
have forsaken their elevations and are moving bodily over the plains
of India, grinding up the rocks into clay and gravel

{p. 391}

as they go, before we accept a theory which declares that they once
marched over the land in this fashion from Hudson's Bay to Cape Horn,
from Spitzbergen to Spain.

The universality of an error proves nothing, except that the error is
universal. The voice of the people is only the voice of God in the
last analysis. We can safely appeal from Caiaphas and Pilate to Time.

But, says another:

"We find deep grooves or striations under the glaciers of to-day;
therefore the glaciers caused the grooves."

But we find striations on level plains far remote from mountains,
where the glaciers could not have been; therefore the glaciers did
not cause the striations. "A short horse is soon curried."
Superposition is not paternity. A porcelain nest-egg found under a
hen is no proof that the hen laid it.

But, says another

"The idea of a comet encountering the earth, and covering it with
_débris_, is so stupendous, so out of the usual course of nature, I
refuse to accept it."

Ah, my friend, you forget that those Drift deposits, hundreds of feet
in thickness, are _there_. _They_ are out of the usual course of
nature. It is admitted that they came suddenly from some source. If
you reject my theory, you do not get clear of the phenomena. The
facts are a good deal more stupendous than the theory. Go out and
look at the first Drift deposit; dig into it a hundred feet or more;
follow it for a few hundred miles or more; then come back, and
scratch your head, and tell me where it came from! Calculate how many
cart-loads there are of it, then multiply this by the area of your
own continent, and multiply that again by the area of two or three
more continents, and then again tell me where it came from!

{p. 392}

Set aside my theory as absurd, and how much nearer are you to solving
the problem? If neither waves, nor icebergs, nor glaciers, nor
ice-sheets, nor comets, produced this world-cloak of _débris_, where
did it come from?

Remember the essential, the incontrovertible elements of the problem:

1. Great heat.

2. A sudden catastrophe.

3. Great evaporation of the seas and waters.

4. Great clouds.

5. An age of floods and snows and ice and torrents.

6. The human legends.

Find a theory that explains and embraces all these elements, and
then, and not until then, throw mine aside.

Another will say:

"But in one place you give us legends about an age of dreadful and
long-continued heat, as in the Arabian tale, where no rain is said to
have fallen for seven years; and in another place you tell us of a
period of constant rains and snows and cold. Are not these statements
incompatible?"

Not at all. This is a big globe we live on: the tropics are warmer
than the poles. Suppose a tremendous heat to be added to our natural
temperature; it would necessarily make it hotter on the equator than
at the poles, although it would be warm everywhere. There can be no
clouds without condensation, no condensation without some degree of
cooling. Where would the air cool first? Naturally at the points most
remote from the equator, the poles. Hence, while the sun was still
blazing in the uncovered heavens of the greater part of the earth,
small caps of cloud would form at the north and south poles, and shed
their moisture in gentle rain. As the heat brought to the earth by
the comet was accidental and

{p. 393}

adventitious, there would be a natural tendency to return to the
pre-comet condition. The extraordinary evaporation would of itself
have produced refrigeration. Hence the cloud-caps would grow and
advance steadily toward the equator, casting down continually
increasing volumes of rain. Snow would begin to form near the poles,
and it too would advance. We would finally have, down to say the
thirty-fifth degree of north and south latitude, vast belts of rain
and snow, while the equator would still be blazing with the tropical
heat which would hold the condensation back. Here, then, we would
have precisely the condition of things described in the "Younger
Edda" of the Northmen:

"Then said Jafnhar: 'All that part of Ginungagap' (the Atlantic)
'that turns toward the north _was filled with thick, heavy ice and
rime_,' (snow,) 'and everywhere within were _drizzling gusts and
rain_. But the south part of Ginungagap was lighted up by the
_glowing sparks_ that flew out of Muspelheim' (Africa?). Added
Thride: 'As cold and all things grim proceeded from Niflheim, so that
which bordered on Muspelheim was hot and bright, and Ginungagap' (the
Atlantic near Africa?) 'was as warm and mild as windless air.'"

Another may say:

"But how does all this agree with your theory that the progenitors of
the stock from which the white, the yellow, and the brown races were
differentiated, were saved in one or two caverns in one place? How
did they get to Africa, Asia, and America?"

In the first place, it is no essential part of my case that man
survived in one place or a dozen places; it can not, in either event,
affect the question of the origin of the Drift. It is simply an
opinion of my own, open to modification upon fuller information. If,
for instance, men dwelt in Asia at that time, and no Drift deposits

{p. 394}

fell upon Asia, races may have survived there; the negro may have
dwelt in India at that time; some of the strange Hill-tribes of China
and India may have had no connection with Lif and Lifthraser.

But if we will suppose that the scene of man's survival was in that
Atlantic island, Atlantis, then this would follow:

The remnant of mankind, whether they were a single couple, like Lif
and Lifthraser; or a group of men and women, like Job and his
companions; or a numerous party, like that referred to in the Navajo
and Aztec legends, in any event, they would not and could not stay
long in the cave. The distribution of the Drift shows that it fell
within twelve hours; but there were probably several days thereafter
during which the face of the earth was swept by horrible cyclones,
born of the dreadful heat. As soon, however, as they could safely do
so, the remnant of the people must have left the cave; the limited
nature of their food-supplies would probably drive them out. Once
outside, their condition was pitiable indeed. First, they encountered
the great heat; the cooling of the atmosphere had not yet begun;
water was a pressing want. Hence we read in the legends of Mimer's
well, where Odin pawned his eye for a drink. And we are told, in an
American legend, of a party who traveled far to find the life-giving
well, and found the possessor sitting over it to hide it. It was
during this period that the legends originated which refer to the
capture of the cows and their recovery by demi-gods, Hercules or Rama.

Then the race began to wander. The world was a place of stones.
Hunger drove them on. Then came the clouds, the rains, the floods,
the snows, the darkness; and still the people wandered. The receded
ocean laid bare the great ridges, if they had sunk in the catastrophe,

{p. 395}

and the race gradually spread to Europe, Africa, and America.

"But," says one, "how long did all this take?

Who shall say? It may have been days, weeks, months, years,
centuries. The Toltec legends say that their ancestors wandered for
more than a hundred years in the darkness.

The torrent-torn face of the earth; the vast rearrangement of the
Drift materials by rivers, compared with which our own rivers are
rills; the vast continental regions which were evidently flooded, all
testify to an extraordinary amount of moisture first raised up from
the seas and then cast down on the lands. Given heat enough to raise
this mass, given the cold caused by its evaporation, given the time
necessary for the great battle between this heat and this
condensation, given the time to restore this body of water to the
ocean, not once but many times,--for, along the southern border of
the floods, where Muspelheim. and Niflheim met, the heat must have
sucked up the water as fast almost as it fell, to fall again, and
again to be lifted up, until the heat-area was driven back and water
fell, at last, everywhere on the earth's face, and the extraordinary
evaporation ceased,--this was a gigantic, long-continued battle.

But it may be asked:

"Suppose further study should disclose the fact that the Drift _is_
found in Siberia and the rest of Asia, and over all the world, what
then? "

It will not disprove my theory. It will simply indicate that the
_débris_ did not, as I have supposed, strike the earth
instantaneously, but that it continued to fall during twenty-four
hours. If the comet was split into fragments, if there was the
"Midgard-Serpent" as well as the

{p. 396}

"Fenris Wolf" and "the dog Garm," they need not necessarily have
reached the earth at the same time.

Another says:

"You supposed in your book, 'Atlantis,' that the Glacial Age might
have been caused by the ridges radiating from Atlantis shutting off
the Gulf Stream and preventing the heated waters of the tropics from
reaching the northern shores of the world."

True; and I have no doubt that these ridges did play an important
part in producing climatic changes, subsequent to the Drift Age, by
their presence or absence, their elevation or depression; but on
fuller investigation I find that they are inadequate to account for
the colossal phenomena of the Drift itself--the presence of the clay
and gravel, the great heat and the tremendous downfall of water.

It may be asked,

"How does your theory account for the removal of great blocks,
weighing many tons, for hundreds of miles from their original site?

The answer is plain. We know the power of the ordinary hurricanes of
the earth. "The largest trees are uprooted, or have their trunks
snapped in two; and few if any of the most massive buildings stand
uninjured."[1] If we will remember the excessive heat and the
electrical derangements that must have accompanied the Drift Age, we
can realize the tremendous winds spoken of in many of the legends. We
have but to multiply the hurricane of the West Indies, or the cyclone
of the Mississippi Valley, a hundred or a thousand fold, and we shall
have power enough to move all the blocks found scattered over the
face of the Drift deposits or mixed with its material.

[1. Appletons' "American Cyclopædia," vol. ix, p. 80.]

{p. 397}

Another asks:

"How do you account for the fact that this Drift material does not
resemble the usual aërolites, which are commonly composed of iron,
and unlike the stones of the earth?"

I nave shown that aërolites have fallen that did not contain any
iron, and that could not be distinguished from the material native to
the earth. And it must be remembered that, while the shining
meteoroids that blaze in periodical showers from radiant points in
the sky are associated with comets, and are probably lost fragments
of comet-tails, these meteoroids do not reach the earth, but are
always burned out, far up in our atmosphere, by the friction produced
by their motion. The iron aërolite is of different origin. It may be
a product of space itself, a condensation of metallic gases. The fact
that it reaches the earth without being consumed would seem to
indicate that it belongs at a lower level than the meteoric showers,
and has, consequently, a less distance to fall and waste.

And these views are confirmed by a recent writer,[1] who, after
showing that the meteoroids, or shooting-stars, are very different
from meteorites or aërolites, and seldom or never reach the earth,
proceeds to account for the former. He says:

"Many theories have been advanced in the past to account for these
strange bodies, but the evidence now accumulated proves beyond
reasonable doubt that they are near relatives, and probably the
_débris_ of comets.

"Tempel's comet is now known to be traveling in the same orbit as the
November meteors, and is near the head of the train, and it appears,
in like manner, that the second comet of 1862 (Swift's comet) is
traveling in the orbit of the August meteors. And the first comet of
1881 seems to be similarly connected with the April meteors. . . .

[1. Ward's "Science Bulletin," E. E. II., 1882, p. 4.]

{p. 398}

"Although few scientific men now question a relationship between
comets and the ordinary meteors, there are those, and among them some
of our ablest men, who think that the large meteors, or bolides, and
aërolites, may be different astronomically, and perhaps physically,
from the ordinary shooting-stars, and in the past some contended that
they originated in our atmosphere others that they were ejected from
terrestrial volcanoes. . . And at the present time the known facts,
and all scientific thought, seem to point to the conclusion that the
difference between them and ordinary shooting-stars is analogous to
that between rain and mist, and, in addition to the reasons already
given for connecting them with comets, may be mentioned the fact that
meteorites bring with them carbonic acid, which is known to form so
prominent a part of comets' tails; and if fragments of meteoric iron
or stone be heated moderately in a vacuum, they yield up gases
consisting of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen, and the
spectrum of these gases corresponds to the spectrum of a cornet's
coma and tail.

"By studying their microscopical structure, Mr. Sorby has been able
to determine that the material was at one time certainly in a state
of fusion; and that the most remote condition of which we have
positive evidence was that of small, detached, melted globules, the
formation of which can not be explained in a satisfactory manner,
except by supposing that their constituents were originally in the
state of vapor, as they now exist in the atmosphere of the sun; and,
on the temperature becoming lower, condensed into these "ultimate
cosmical particles." These afterward collected into larger masses,
which have been variously changed by subsequent metamorphic action,
and broken up by repeated mutual impact, and often again collected
together and solidified. The meteoric irons are probably those
portions of the metallic constituents which were separated from the
rest by fusion when the metamorphism was carried to that extreme
point.'"

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