Which flood through heat should be classed, if with scant comfort for its victims, as a mere incidental water-end. The aqueous future proper that, confirming some ancient beliefs, some modern geologists foretell is the less spectacular one of the slow conquest of the world’s land by the world’s sea, the gradual covering of the earth by the waters of the great deep. The erosionists clasp Noah’s Ark.
Whether the Bible Deluge ever took place is matter of combat and conjecture. Great inundations all agree there must have been; whether one of these was not merely widespread but almost universal, and whether not almost universal but quite, forms the subject of a whole literature and is still an unsettled controversy, even among anti-inspirationists themselves and those most anxious to prove all old tales old wives’ tales. Some geologists discern in the past—as some others in the future also—a time of worldwide volcanic eruptions and upheaval of mountain chains, accompanied by subsidences of land and followed by great waves of translation that traversed the tumbled continents and engulphed the antediluvian animals with antediluvian man. What of Cythera? The upward-fleeing skeletons from base to peak, seeking vain safety from the waters behind and upon them? What of the Mountain of Bones?
How the Flood began and proceeded: how the windows of heaven were opened and all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, how the waters increased, how they prevailed, how they prevailed exceedingly upon the earth, fifteen cubits upwards did the waters prevail, and how all the high hills that were under the whole heaven were covered, with only Noah remaining alive and they that were with him in the ark, all this is known to every child in Christendom: the Bible tells him. How in the pagan variant it was Jupiter and not Jehovah who sent forth the rain-bringing South wind and summoned the sea, till the dolphins played among the forest-tops and the wolves swam among the sheep and only Parnassus tip was left and only Deucalion son of Prometheus and Pyrrha daughter of Pandora were saved in their boat, is known to every child of the classics: Apollodorus informs us. How in the Chaldaean stories, Hasisadra (or Xisathros), warned by Ea (or Kronos), took into the ark with him not only couples of the domestic animals but also a couple of domestic servants, one male and one female, both butler and bondswoman, so that that useful species also might be perpetuated, along with a few “intimate friends” and Buzurkugel, the trained steersman, is familiar to Orientalists: who have the tablets that Asshur-banipal ordered, and Berosius’ exciting narrative. How the Red Indians remembered it, as in the story Snapping Turtle told his paleface questioner, we know from beloved Catlin. How the Celestial flood was worldwide like the Pentateuchal, and how Yü proved himself every inch a Noah, stands written in Shu King, in the oldest of literatures. How, finally, in almost all peoples’ traditions the event is there, though the details may differ oddly, and what those details are, is known to comparative folklore students and diluvian specialists alone.
The races without any flood record are few: only the Negroes, the Japanese and the Egyptians. There is a theory that the last-named once had the legend, but deliberately forgot it or changed it. For them the rising of waters was their wealth, their life, their hope; that one flood they knew, yearly, Nilotic, was the best thing they knew. Flood as disaster they could not conceive of; any such legend must be a false legend.
Despite this almost universal tradition, no quiet universal deluge may ever have taken place. Local disasters may have been magnified by memory and myth into general ones.
The Shu King account is indeed partly founded on fact; for in the twenty-fourth century before Jesus the Hwang-Ho, Yellow River, Sorrow of China, had historically risen and ruined half the land. Half the land though, not half the world. Then the Noachian story. The animals went in two by two. Did they, forsooth! What ablest zoo-keeper from Hamburg or Regent’s Park could pretend that with a total staff of seven—wife, three sons, and three sons’ wives—to help him he could have managed that multitudinous procession of all the beasts of the field and fowls of the air, the dinosaurs and the donkeys, the iguanodons and the hummingbirds, the moths and the behemoths, not to consider the quantity and diversity of the fodder to be collected and stored, and the cage (or cabin) arrangements, and the cleaning?
Yet, when every little Victorian laugh has been re-laughed, the strangely widespread character of the story must be allowed to count for much, supported as it is by evidence ranging from the state of the mammoth fossils in Siberia, and the position of bones in countless cave recesses, far apart, where only water could have carried them, and the grouping of those bones, men’s and hyaenas’ side by side, who would never
