In Spain, Italy and France, gradually abandoned by their inhabitants, solitude spread slowly over the ruins of former cities. Lisbon had disappeared, destroyed by the sea; Madrid, Rome, Naples and Florence were in ruins. A little later, Paris, Lyons and Marseilles were overtaken by the same fate.
Human types and languages had undergone such transformations that it would have been impossible for an ethnologist or a linguist to discover anything belonging to the past. For a long time neither Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, English nor German had been spoken. Europe had migrated beyond the Atlantic, and Asia had invaded Europe. The Chinese to the number of a thousand million had spread over western Europe. Mingling with the Anglo-Saxon race, they formed in some measure a new one. Their principal capital stretched like an endless street along each side of the canal from Bordeaux to Toulouse and Narbonne.
The causes which led to the foundation of Lutetia on an island in the Seine, which had raised this city of the Parisians to the zenith of its power in the twenty-fifth century, were no longer operative, and Paris had disappeared simultaneously with the causes to which it owed its origin and splendor. Commerce had taken possession of the Mediterranean and the great oceanic highways, and the Iberian canal had become the emporium of the world.
The littoral of the south and west of ancient France had been protected by dikes against the invasion of the sea, but, owing to the increase of population in the south and southwest, the north and northwest had been neglected, and the slow and continual subsidence of this region, observed ever since the time of Caesar, had reduced its level below that of the sea; and as the channel was ever widening, and the cliffs between Cape Helder and Havre were being worn away by the action of the sea, the Dutch dikes had been abandoned to the ocean, which had invaded the Netherlands, Belgium, and northern France, Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Versailles, Lille, Amiens and Rouen had sunk below the water, and ships floated above their sea-covered ruins.
Paris itself, finally abandoned in the sixtieth century, when the sea had surrounded it as it now does Havre, was, in the eighty-fifth century, covered with water to the height of the towers of Notre Dame, and all that memorable plain, where were wrought out, during so many years, the most brilliant of the world’s civilizations, was swept by angry waves.4
As in the case of languages, ideas, customs and laws, so, also, the manner of reckoning time had changed. It was still reckoned by years and centuries, but the Christian era had been discarded, as also the holy days of the calendar and the eras of the Mussulman, Jewish, Chinese and African chronologies. There was now a single calendar for the entire race, composed of twelve months, divided into four equal trimesters of three months of thirty-one, thirty, and thirty days, each trimester containing exactly thirteen weeks. New Year’s Day was a fête day, and was not reckoned in with the year; every bisextile year there were two. The week had been retained. Every year commenced on the same day—Monday; and the same dates always corresponded to the same days of the week. The year began with the vernal equinox all over the world. The era, a purely astronomical division of time, began with the coincidence of the December solstice with perihelion, and was renewed every 25,765 years. This rational method had succeeded the fantastic divisions of time formerly in use.
The geographical features of France, of Europe and of the entire world had become modified, from century to century. Seas had replaced continents, and new deposits at the bottom of the ocean covered the vanished ages, forming new geological strata. Elsewhere, continents had taken the place of seas. At the mouth of the Rhone, for example, where the dry land had already encroached upon the sea from Arles to the littoral, the continent gained to the south; in Italy, the deposits of the Po had continued to gain upon the Adriatic, as those of the Nile, the Tiber, and other rivers of later origin, had gained upon the Mediterranean; and in other places the dunes had increased, by various amounts, the domain of the dry land. The contours of seas and continents had so changed that it would have been absolutely impossible to make out the ancient geographical maps of history.
The historian of nature does not deal with periods of five centuries, like the Arab of the thirteenth century mentioned in the legend related a moment ago. Ten times this period would scarcely suffice to modify, sensibly, the configuration of the land, for five thousand years are but a ripple on the ocean of time. It is by tens of thousands of years that one must reckon if one would see continents sink below the level of seas, and new territories emerging into the
