The Worm Forgives the Plough

by John Stewart Collis

  Not that these operations always go through as smoothly as this. Too much oxygen may get in owing to a loosely piled hill, or unharmonious bacteria may undo the good work and denitrify the nitrate expelling it out in gases, until another body of bacteria comes forward, the gallant Azotobacters who, rising to the occasion, re-nitrify the de-nitrified and unburn the burnt – if I may be said to have followed the proceedings rightly.1

  Anyway there is no place where I am more content to stand than here upon this dunghill, where that which is invisible is found to be mightier than the monumental mockeries of men – nay, where the things that are not, are raised above the things that are.

  5 The Mystery of Clouds

  While harrowing one afternoon I saw a cloud looking like a cloud-capped tower itself. (I was pleased with it for this, for it did something to make up for the annoyance at having once seen a cloud like a grand piano before ever I heard Trigorin report the same thing.) Then, as is my way, I asked myself, with resolute candour, how much I knew about clouds. Did I know what a cloud is? And as usual I found only a few bits and pieces of ill-related and undigested fact strewn about somewhere in the upper floor of my head. So, again according to practice, I threw the lot away and started from scratch.

  First, as to the different kinds of cloud (for Nature seldom goes in for one sample of anything). They have been classified, of course, and named. It is amusing to read academic writers when they get going on the classification business. Studying such authorities one would really think that the clouds had been classified and named at the Beginning; whereas it is we who classify them in a frantic attempt to bestow order amongst them so that we may be able to see them better and grapple with them. Speaking for myself, however, I find that the exhaustive classification, including the inevitable sub-divisions to cover the numerous border cases, only makes the thing more mixed than ever, and I am content to acknowledge just three classes. First, the upper or Cirrus clouds often small and in vast droves of celestial sheep, wispy and frail – ‘flocks of Admetus under Apollo’s keeping. Who else could shepherd such? He by day, dog Sirius by night; or huntress Diana herself – her bright arrows driving away the clouds of prey that would ravage her fair flocks’. They are often as high as thirty thousand feet and are not seen low. Second, the Rain clouds which are the lowest of all and are seen as wide films of grey and dark. Third, between these two lots there are seen accumulated heaps which are gathered under the general head of Cumulus. It is these last that hold our attention most.

  What is a cloud? It is invisible water made visible. The atmosphere is full of water, but we cannot see it until too much of it gets up there. Then it suddenly becomes visible, like a magic flower growing out of nothing in the sky. The heat of the sun is constantly evaporating water from land and sea, and taking it up into the air until saturation point is reached – as declared by the clouds. I make that statement because it is ‘authoritative’ and I must be authoritative; but I do not understand it, since on that showing one might expect more clouds on a hot day than on a cold one. But let it pass.

  Clouds are water, and they have weight – we know that much. Then why do they not sink to the ground? They should be continually falling at our feet. Yet they stay up there, though they are not supported from below nor held from above. These are simple questions; but the greatest descriptive writer of all time – he confined himself to the sea – acknowledged that he always found these simple problems ‘the knottiest of all’. When I seek an answer to such questions to whom do I turn? Not to the schoolmasters, not to the academicians, not to the authorities. I turn always to the Masters, to the Stylists – to a Fabre, to a Melville, to a Ruskin. Is Ruskin puzzled by this? Of course. And his answer? He hasn’t one. He says he can’t make it out. ‘I believe we do not know what makes clouds float. Clouds are water in some fine form or other: but water is heavier than air, and the finest form you can give a heavy thing will not make it float in a light thing. On it, yes; as a boat: but in it, no. Clouds are not boats, nor boat-shaped, and they float in the air, not on top of it.’

  Yet perhaps the solution is provided in a book I have beside me on clouds by G A Clarke, FRPS, FRMETSOC. He does not raise this specific question deliberately or clearly, of course; but if I can pierce through the language in which such books are written, I think he says that clouds continually evaporate at the bottom and renew themselves at the top – so that our given cloud which should be falling at our feet does not do so because it is always ceasing to exist and always being rebuilt. But maybe he hasn’t really said that, or wouldn’t hold that he had said it – for the minor scientist, like the minor philosopher and the minor statesman, never likes to say anything definite.

  Another question. How is it that clouds are so complete, so sharp in their outline? We look up into the sky and see these chiselled leviathans swimming through the ocean of air at the bottom of which we walk, these drastic shapes each margined against the blue with a termination as clean as the Cliffs of Moher; but they are not solids, and the last thing we should expect is this firm binding of the unboundaried moisture in the airy wastes.

  I turn again to Ruskin, and again he does not know the answer. ‘What hews it into a heap, or spins it into a web?’ he asks. ‘Cold is usually shapeless, I suppose, extending over large spaces equally, or with gradual diminution. You can’t have, in the open air, angles and wedges, and coils, and cliffs of cold. Yet the vapour stops suddenly, sharp and steep as a rock, or thrusts itself across the gates of heaven in likeness of a brazen bar; or braids itself in and out, and across and across, like a tissue of tapestry; or falls into ripples, like sand; or into waving shreds and tongues, as fire. On what anvils and wheels is the vapour pointed, twisted, hammered, whirled as the potter’s clay? By what hands is the incense of the sea built up into domes of marble?’

  No doubt there are up-to-date answers to such questions; but personally I would just as soon leave it there. Certainly there is nothing in Nature more mysterious than clouds. And nothing stirs the imagination more than those creatures that are not alive; those buildings not made of brick; those domed and daring palaces in which there reigns no king; those vast foundries flaming without fire; those mountain ranges upon which no feet may ever walk; those radiant prospects of a far country belonging to the paradise lost regions of the heart. They stir us; but they do not calm, they cannot soothe. ‘We all look up into the blue sky for comfort,’ said Coleridge, ‘but nothing appears there, nothing comforts, nothing answers us, and so we die.’ And if we see therein some clouds, vessels made of water, journeying to nowhere and appearing out of nothing, they do not answer us, they bring no comfort. Indeed we have to be strong in spirit to bear looking at them at all. We must not be depressed. We must not be ill. We must not be worried. We must not be in debt. We must not be in prison: there is real agony of Wilde’s forever haunting lines on the wistful look cast ‘Upon that little tent of blue We prisoners called the sky, And at every careless cloud that passed In happy freedom by’. We must not be feeling futile – for then they will seem infuriatingly futile and drive us mad. It must not be Sunday afternoon in a town; we know what Franz Kafka meant when, feeling miserable on a Sunday afternoon, he was ‘astonished sometimes by the almost unending senseless passing of the dull clouds’. It must not be in time of war. We cannot cloud-gaze today (1943). The time is not yet, but even as I write the time draws near when many who saw them only as the phantoms of their fears, shall hail them as the messengers of joy and peace.

  6 The Books of Stone

  One day, while ploughing the chalky Dorset down, my share threw up many stones. When, at the headland, I stopped my horse and lifted the turn-furrow clear of the soil, I saw that a number of attractive-looking flints lay at my feet. I picked up a few of them. They were all much alike: flat on one side, and on the other shaped like a little hill; and upon that hill a graceful design was traced: a star with five wings, some deeply engraved – embanked railway-tracks with sleepers the size of ribs on a na
il-file.

  They were the flint-casts of sea-urchins belonging to the Chalk Age of the earth in the Mesozoic Era. One hundred million years ago those creatures had made their likeness, had traced their death-masks on the flowing flints. One hundred million years ago these very things I looked at were existing! Was it Time made visible? Did I hold Eternity in the palm of my hand? Standing there in that lonely and lovely place, on that bare ocean-moulded hill, in November 1944, I pressed my mind back through the bottomless abysses of time, back beyond the dawn of man, beyond the Tertiary, beyond the Eocene, back to the Cretacean shore.

  Then Australia and New Zealand, joining with Africa and South America, made a single mass. The north of England and Ireland were one with America and with Norway. The Mediterranean flowed across the Sahara Desert. Italy lay buried in the deep. Some of France emerged, but Paris was the centre of a deep basin. Holland, Belgium, Denmark, and the regions of the Rhine were all part of a sea that stretched to the Carpathians. The south of England was submerged. Such is the general picture; but we are dealing with unmeasured immensities of time – this given period covering over fifty million years itself – and during that age the site of London alone, for instance, seems to have been above and below water several times. Today we think of the long, wild washing of the Atlantic waves and of the depth of that water: it is hard indeed to think of it ever as land – still less of becoming land again, as may happen, when the enfossilled wrecks of ships will reveal their tale of violence and death. It is hard to think of an enthroned mountain peak or sheep-grazed valley as folded in the arms of the sea. Yet thus it has been. Many parts of the earth have been widely flooded, and then have risen again, only to sink once more. But the rate of rising and sinking, according to the measurements to be read from the rocks, is in the nature of one foot in ten thousand years. At the moment we might be pardoned for considering this stationary. But there are no stations upon earth: not one single thing is fixed; and though I may stand today upon the hill, deciphering the tablets of stone, I must learn that the cold waves flowed here before, smoothing out these rounded hills, and that they may flow again and wash away our chronicle . . . Not quite, though; future fossils too will make their script. and the mighty Mind, exalted above all time, will read the pages of the flinty books.

  Between the end of the Jurassic and the beginning of the Tertiary Era a great amount of chalk was formed. It was such a striking episode that the whole period has been called the Cretaceous Age. Minute and innumerable oceanic animals, called foraminifera, floating about near the surface of the sea, sank to the bottom when dead, and then accumulated in a slowly solidifying ooze. We call the resultant accumulation Chalk. If we examine a handful of it under a microscope we find that it consists of the casing of the foraminifera – really shells of the most delicate and beautiful design, six thousand to a square inch. In view of the fact that such deposits are only found today at a depth of about twelve thousand feet, it would seem that this Dorset hill was once in the abysses of the sea whose surface flowed where the low flying clouds float now . . . We approach the white cliffs of Dover, and gaze upward at the seeming solid shows of earth and rock. It is well to realize the reality, that this too is water or chiefly water in another style, and that upon the backs of innumerable urchins of the sea our history is stayed.

  The era that is called Chalk is given a span of some sixty-five million years, and is said to have ended roughly one hundred million years ago – (though we can hardly suppose that foraminifera were absent from the seas in either Jurassic, Triassic, or Tertiary times). It is proper to call the Cretaceous Age modern if we are willing to think realistically of Time: for the earth had already rolled for two thousand million years. We can call it modern, also, because some of the trees and flora familiar today began to appear. Man was not to arrive on earth for another hundred million years; and yet the scene would not seem wholly strange to us even now. Ferns, sedges, and reeds in marshes and swampy places; a grove of poplars against a winter’s sky; willows and alders by a river bank; laurels, magnolias, and vines on the hillside; elms, oaks, conifers, maples, palms and eucalyptus trees: all these things, so familiar to us, had ancestors rooted at that time. ‘No man knows,’ said Walter de la Mare, ‘through what wild centuries Roves back the rose.’ Flowering plants do reach back to the Cretacean lands, while the ancestry of trees breaks the boundaries of our conception. To this day we can see, on the shore of the Isle of Wight, a Chalk Age conifer which had been swept down a river and buried with silt, a twenty-foot length of fossilized trunk, indifferent to the assault of centuries. The leafy arbour, the climbing ivy on the bended trunk, reel back in time beyond our power to pass in thought; that is why, seated in such a place on a summer’s day, we lose ambition, and hardly claim identity, made languid by an air that joins us with the immeasurable wastes of the Mesozoic.

  Some of the animals of that time are also familiar to us, and have sent representatives down to our day. Then, as now, the crocodile lay on the shore like a log of wood; that slippery rope of life we call the snake was there; the four-legged footstool of stone named turtle had his place. In those days they had the whole earth as their playground. But they did not rule it, they were not the lords of life. There were other creatures, more formidable, who have sent us no messengers. These were the Dinosaurs. They were the supreme beings of that world – though called by us monsters. They ruled throughout the Jurassic and lasted until the end of the Cretaceous Era. There were many of them – in Britain alone at least one hundred and twenty-one different kinds. They have given us no descendants but they have left us some of their skeletons, by which documents we can tell what they looked like. Anyone in London can gaze upon the erected figure of the Iguanodon. In 1822 it was dug up in Kent. After a hundred million years it has risen from the grave. Assisted by men’s hands and surviving men’s bombs, it stands on its hind legs at South Kensington, a twenty-five foot skeleton (others have been found twice the size), untarnished by time, and ready to march on through the years, its extravagant and appalling aspect a silent and perpetual admonition to bewildered man.

  With the neck of a giraffe, the tail of a sea-serpent, the body of a kangaroo, the head of a horse, and the brain of a hen, the Iguanodon hopped on land and swam in the swamps. Possessing multiple rows of grinding teeth it fed upon plants. The amount of herbs eaten in those days is suggested by the equipment of the Trachadon who had two thousand and seventy-two teeth. Indeed the turning of vegetation into flesh was on such a scale that it promoted the growth of the Atlantosaurus who roamed in those regions now lost to the waves. It was nearly eighty feet in length – a territory too extensive to be governed by a single brain. Since the controlling nerves from the head would have had to traverse too many feet of neck before reaching the limbs or establishing communication with the tail, the Atlantosaurus, in common with the some other Dinosaurs, evolved a second brain in a cavity within the hinder part of its body.2 This was the largest of the herbivorous monsters, but the Brontosaurus who made a noise like the advance of thunder was sixty feet long, its footprint covered a square yard of ground, and it weighed as much as thirty-eight tons. The Diplodocus was built nearly on the same scale and looked like an elephant whose nose was its neck and whose tail was a snake. These Dinosaurs, including the Morosaurus of forty feet, and many others were amphibious and may have had some peaceful times in the water when nothing of them could be seen save the neck – a pole giving little hint of the island of flesh below. There they were safe from the carnivorous Dinosaurs on land. But they must have had to face the sea-dragons or fish-lizards. The lchthyosaurus had a fish-like body without a neck: its limbs were paddles, its nose a sword, its jaws an armoury of teeth, while its eyes, the size of arc-lamps, enabled it to explore the darkness of the depths where it could see for long distances. It dwelt, amongst other places, at Lyme Regis, in company with the Plesiosaurus, or Sea Dragon, one of which found at Ely, had a swimming paddle seven feet long, a jaw of six feet, and a tooth of fifteen i
nches. These and others, of which there were over fifty varieties, were all air-breathing. So were the Sea Serpents, of which there were more than forty different kinds, varying in length up to seventy-five feet, abounding in North America and at what is now the mouth of the Thames. Though they had teeth in columns of fours along the roofs of their mouths they swallowed their prey whole. They were very like snakes, with arrow-shaped heads. Such was the Elasmosaur whose neck rose twenty feet out of the water while its body was forty feet below the surface.

  There may have been birds during this era. At least one is known to us – the Archaeopteryx. It was feathered, and about the size of a rook. There were plenty of flying reptiles. They certainly were not birds, and we may be sure that they sang no songs. They had no feathers, just as the earth-bound Dinosaurs had no fur. They pertained to the condition of super-bats. These were the Flying Lizards, the Pterodactyls, whose beaks, about the length of a rifle, were set with teeth, and whose outspread wings in some instances covered as much air as a small aeroplane.

  These sea and airborne carriages could keep out of reach of the carnivorous Dinosaurs. Those who remained on dry land had to fight it out amongst themselves. The ferocity of the battles between Dinosaur and Dinosaur is sufficiently signified by the frightfulness of their armour. The Stegosaurus carried upon its back a series of enormous plates resembling a double row of tombstones. Formidable indeed must have been the foes that caused the evolution of such defence Who could take this fortress? Who enter in at this gate? The Polacanthus Foxi was a walking wall with barbs; the Triceratops was a twenty-five foot boulder; the Scolosaurus, with its cuirass and armoured cape, its ruff of plate, its spiked nose, and its mace-like tail was fit to face the Tyrannosaurus whose teeth were nearly the size of bayonets, and was a match for the Struthiominus who was one hundred and thirteen feet long. Some of the eggs of these plated reptiles have come down to us. The age of mammals had not yet arrived, and these immensities of bone and flesh, these armoured engines of destruction, at first lay confined within the circle of an egg, which was about the size of a super hand-grenade – though informed with a greater potential.