Mount Bermuda

I

IT was half-past four in the afternoon of t he Second Day of Creation, and in a drowned world I was wet and cold and hungry and idle and bored. Then things began to happen inside my mind, and at 4.45 I was still wet, but neither cold nor hungry nor idle, and hence not bored.

At the very tip of the long, southward-pointing finger of Nonsuch is a small cliff jutting out to sea between two little gorges, and on the uttermost point I was perched in a deluge of rain, hugging my knees and wishing for the sun. Only the day before I had been desirous of knowing something of the beginning of Nonsuch and of Bermuda, and now, suddenly, I realized that my wish had been answered, and instead of squatting, disgruntled and bored, I focused all my imagination on making the most of this cosmic opportunity. There must have been a moon in existence somewhere in the firmament beyond all this dampness, for the tide was high, although the horizontal water was quite hidden by the vertical downpour.

The isolation of my perch was such that not a particle of land — dry or otherwise — was visible. I should not have been surprised if a school of active fish had dashed past, and twice I glanced obliquely upward, half expecting to see the keel of a boat, as when I am submerged in the diving helmet. I could breathe only by keeping my head well down. Every portion of my body was wet, so, having nothing for comparison, I was not conscious of moisture. At first I had been aware of dripping and splashing and the slap of waves, but these, by interminable repetition, had become part of underwater silence. I might have been the last of the evil pre-Noahites, about to slip into oblivion. And then even this conceit left, me, and I attained a damp Nirvana; hunger, cold, wetness, boredom, were forgotten, and I was an utterly inadequate but appreciative mind looking on at the birth of Bermuda.

Students of the planets and of our jolly, round, whirling earth have given us an estimate of cosmic evolution considerably longer than that of the Bible. I have known days, indeed, which seemed like an eternity, and Einstein tells us that space annihilates both ether and time. Stiil the human mind likes to mumble definite figures, even though they are far beyond actual appreciation. So I recall with moist satisfaction that the birth of the seven seas must have been somewhere around a billion years ago. This seemed ancient even to me on my oceanic pedestal, and my mind flew ahead to the time, twenty or thirty millions of years ago, when the volcanoes of the western Atlantic began to push and boil upward. Unlike the usual cluster of such outbursts, that of Bermuda was solitary in mid-ocean. In the West Indies and Antilles, seven or eight hundred miles to the south, there were scores of neighborly outlets which nosed their way up from the bottom into light and air, and far across the Atlantic, twenty-five hundred miles east, the volcanic constellation of the Azores broke surface.

Here in complete isolation, at the bidding of some deep-hidden geological whim, the lava began to ooze forth, and, after an inconceivable chemical battle with the icy waters two miles down, piled up the scarlet, molten rock from the very vitals of Mother Earth, pitting its three thousand degrees of sheer heat against the all but freezing water, backed by two tons pressure to the inch. As far as we know to-day (and this knowledge barely creeps across the line from the illimitable Land of Minus), this mountain reached the surface with one peak, to a southernmost particle of which I was now clinging. But on the slopes of this great submarine massif two mighty side cones stretched themselves up — so high that they almost made of Bermuda a trio of island centres. To-day they are known as the Challenger and Argus Banks, flat-topped peaks, fifteen and thirty miles offshore and only a few fathoms beneath the surface. I have dredged the former from the Arcturus and gleaned a great mass of seaweed and reef animals, and I have fished it from the Gladisfen and found it aboil with sharks. This is Bermuda Mountain as we know it to-day.

But, to go back, here was I blinded and surrounded by water, and all I knew of the world was that I rested on a hard bit of crag — so Bermuda must be above water. The Third Day of Genesis was yet to dawn, for early therein is a mention of dry land, and that was, to my senses, yet to come. Shifting my cramped limbs, I slipped and slid down the rivulets and waterfalls until by the mere cessation of liquid sound I knew I had reached the level of most of our globe. The downpour had long ago flattened whatever motion the ocean might have had of its own. I dipped still farther — the rain ceased to pelt my knees and shoulders and I knew I was neck-deep under sea. I reached out and swashed the water back and forth, and something stuck between my fingers. I plucked at it and palmed it, and climbed back upon the only material in the world which was not water. Bracing my toes into convenient crevices, I shook the water from my eyes and gazed mistily at what I had salvaged from the waves.

Vague messages traveled from eyes to mind — strangely from a forgotten world, a world which held such qualities as sunlight and dryness, an unwatery world. I held a grape in my hand, — that idea persisted for a long time, — and I looked steadily at it between drops, trying to picture the necessary dryness which was required to make of a grape a reality. I had almost succeeded when a spark of accessory memory made it plain that this could not be a grape. It might have been several other things, but its actualness burst upon me and for a few moments I experienced the joy which has come only twice before in my life, when I have been playing a silly game with myself and my mind (as at present hugging the idea of the Second Day of Creation), and suddenly have had Earth or Sky or Cosmos take a hand, lean down, and play with me. I felt like Ord when he glimpsed the hand of the Player enormous in the sky, over the heads of the gods. Only in my case it was nothing but a little green sphere, which, if very hard, might have been an emerald; if sheltering a cluster of small seeds, would most assuredly have been a grape.

My second memory was correct and I knew that my fingers had closed upon a Halicystis floating in this waste of waters. And the knowledge that it was this made me shout aloud into the world of drops that the Third Day of Creation had dawned, and I was here to see! But if I am to be a consistent surveyor of the evolution of Nonsuch I must keep my Halicystis shut away for a while in my closed fist and pretend I have not yet seen it.

II

Bermuda has two nicknames which to us on Nonsuch are gross misnomers. One is ‘The Isles of Rest.’ This slogan comes stamped across our envelopes and for the average tourist it is doubtless very true. To us, whose work day is measured only by our physical being’s absolute limit of energy, it is only comic. The second is ‘Coral Islands,’ when as a matter of fact there is not a particle of coral in the inorganic make-up of Bermuda. Living coral, in small and large heads, is indeed abundant on the submerged reefs, although even here it is only a veneer of encrusted life.

Bermuda is undoubtedly the apex of a mighty volcanic mountain. A recent deep boring, made in the hope of finding fresh water, failed completely in its purpose, but provided absolute proof of ancient volcanic activity. The first three hundred and sixty feet showed limestone such as we find to-day everywhere in Bermuda. For the next two hundred feet yellowish clay-like rocks represented decomposed volcanic tufa. From here down to the extreme limit of boring, fourteen hundred feet, there was nothing but black volcanic rock, and this undoubtedly extended down to the very ocean floor. The only lava I have seen is a bit from the gizzard of a sandpiper, freshly arrived from Greenland. Everywhere, on all the islands, are crags and cliffs and outcroppings of stratified rock, soft where newly exposed and hardened to the consistency of steel where lashed by breakers. The multitudes ot superimposed leaves of stone do not mark past lava flows or deposits on an ancient sea bottom, but sheets of wind-blown sand swirled over prehistoric dunes.

As long as my watery world reigned supreme I could well make my date millions upon millions of years B. c., but when the low afternoon light began to sift through the rain, and I could dimly see the fissures and crags of the hardened, wind-blown rocks of Nonsuch, then eons of time passed quickly and I again came down the scale to, geologically speaking, almost contemporary times — say in early Pleistocene, about two millions of years back.

Here we have a geological conundrum. At this time — twenty thousand centuries ago — let us suppose we have a potential Bermuda submerged a little distance beneath the surface of the ocean. How can we make this into isles of rest without raising the crest of the submerged volcano or adding coral or other material to its summit? The only logical remaining possibility appears to be absurd — the lowering of the ocean itself; and yet this is exactly what happened. If a pail of water is allowed partly to freeze overnight and the ice is then removed, the level of the remaining water will be considerably lowered. So, many years ago in the Pleistocene, great windstorms carried away vast quantities of water, drawn up into clouds from the oceans, and deposited them as snow over all the northern lands of the world. The snow then turned into ice and pushed southward, and the first glacial epoch began. Little by little, as more water was piled up on land, the level of the Atlantic Ocean sank, and Bermuda Mountain came nearer and nearer to the surface. Finally, when over a half-mile thickness of ice had formed, the level of the sea was lowered more than two hundred and fifty feet, leaving Bermuda high and dry.

Dry Bermuda at this time was of considerable extent, and the terrific windstorms probably prevented the growth of any vegetation. But snails, uncounted hosts of snails, barnacles, sea urchins, bryozoans, and other shelly creatures found the shores excellent for existence and thrived. Generations died and their homes were smashed by the waves and ground up into sand, and this was blown into high dunes and cemented by the rain. ‘And so, Dearly Beloved,’ was written the second chapter of Bermuda. When I stand upon the summit of Nonsuch and look eastward toward Coopers, or south to Gurnet or west to Castle, I see everywhere the paper-thin records of past wind-borne sand (more euphoniously, icolian), once fine as powder, now hardened into limestone or very marble. And when I dive four or five fathoms down to the bottom of Nonsuch Bay, or farther out on the edge of the ocean abyss itself, there again are everywhere the fixed records of ancient dunes.

The first time I drove across Bermuda I noticed in the sheer limestone walls, where the road cuts deep into the hills, an occasional stratum of rich red loam, many feet beneath the present surface. It remained for Dr. Sayles, when on a visit to me on Nonsuch, to make plain the meaning of the several layers of earth lying between the numerous records of ancient windswept sand. They represent the successive interglacial periods of warmth, when the water would rise, reducing the exposed surface and curtailing the wind-blown dunes whose formation necessitated considerable areas above water. During periods such as these, the conditions would be much like the present, when the cessation of constant movement of shifting sand would permit the establishment and growth of plant life a nd the slow accumulation of earth and mould. In the course of time there would come another glacial period, with a reexposing of great extents of surface, and the whirling sands would quickly destroy and bury the plants and the collected soil. And so on, until Dr. Sayles believes he can recognize no fewer than four distinct soils representing as many interglacial times of windless warmth.

III

As the rain slackened and the afternoon sun grew stronger I saw, from my semi-aquatic seat, the gray and black crags about me. Beneath my hand was a thickened slab with six delicate layers, the fourth twice the depth of the others. I fingered this particular layer, crumbled its edge into sand grains, and flung a handful into the air. And then I tried to imagine the mighty wind which last had swirled these over the dunes and into that other air — hot or cold — which blew over this spot at least fifty thousand years before the first glimmerings of historic human life. And I and my work and my opinions seemed, like Kim, to be very small and of very little account and of no real importance whatever.

I began to muse on what was the use of it all, and why bother about anything any longer, and because this, like charity, is only an inverted form of egotism and conceit, my partner in my silly game of long ago sprang another surprise. I noticed that there was a mist of sorts between me and the stratified sand near by. I looked up, and, as far as emotional effect went, a full charge of high explosive might have gone off at my elbow. I experienced a visual shell-shock, for high overhead there was etched the strongest, most materialistic rainbow I have ever seen, one end of which began in mid-air, and the other curved down, down, down, holding true from red to violet, to the rock beside me. Once before, on a Guiana jungle river, I had been actually at the end of a rainbow, when, at my very side, one colored the bulwarks of an Akawai canoe.

As I stood up I dropped my Halicystis grape, but swiftly salvaged it again as it bobbed about on the water, not because of its great rarity, but by reason of its part in my game. For on the Third Day of Creation, somewhere about seven hundred millions of years ago, when the waters and the sky and the earth had been running satisfactorily for a while, there appeared the first living organisms comparable with my pseudo-grape. For several reasons the round, green Halicystis is the most appropriate of modern living beings to play the part of one of the earliest of organisms. First of all it is a plant, an alga, and plants certainly preceded animals. And, secondly, it is a single cell, and unquestionably the Protophyta are the most accurately named of all groups. Again, many creatures of ancient times amaze us with their astounding size; pterodactyls, dragon flies, brontosaurs, titanotheres, moas — all exceed any corresponding organisms living on the earth to-day. In Halicystis we have a contemporary miracle, no whit lass wonderful than would be a living six-foot ant, or a fifty-foot dog, or a hundred-foot man. When we think of a single cell we think automatically of something microscopic, such as the cells in the human body which have an average diameter of a fraction of a millimetre. In Halicystis, however, we have a large green marble, probably the largest cell in the world.

Aside from its interest so germane to my present mood, Halicystis is a very remarkable organism. The Bermudians call the little plants ‘sea bottles,’ and after storms they are sometimes found in dozens washed ashore along the south beach on Nonsuch. They have great resiliency, and when fresh and alive will bounce five or six feet from a smooth surface. When the sun shines brightly upon a group on the sand just as they have been left by the waves, their beauty is that of polished emeralds—the sunlight passing through their translucent, green substance and deeply staining their thin shadows.

They may be round or pyriform, and no one knows where they begin life, whether hidden beneath some rock near shore or, as is more probable, farther out in the mysterious mid-zone. Unlike related forms, when freed from their slight attachment they float buoyantly. In an aquarium they will live for a week or more, then gradually pale out until they are like ghosts of grapes, and, little by little, settle to the bottom with only a few jade-colored granules in place of the nucleus and all the complex vital mechanisms of this ‘simple’ plant of the sea. I have measured a Halicystis one and one-half by two inches, and some have been reported to grow as large as a hen’s egg.

The ease of collection of this and related sea bottles, and the extraordinary size of this single cell, have led to the detailed study of the effects of electricity and various chemical compounds and elements upon them — experimentation which may conceivably lead to better knowledge of cellular health and disease in the human body.

To-day when I walk the beach, with the storm’s aftermath pounding on the sand, the small green globes not only appeal to me with their intrinsic beauty, but they recall the delight that one of them gave when it so fittingly ushered into my imagination the dawn of the Third Day of Creation — a matter of more than half a billion years gone by.