Drought

Not water, but dearth thereof; not drowning, but drouth.

A negative mode for our finishing, and one therefore that has occupied less place in the fears and imaginations of men.

Yet, though there’s no drought story spread wide to match the flood story, shortage of water is like to have been both more frequent and more fatal than excess thereof, at any rate since measurable antiquity; more men and beasts have died of it, and of the famine its offspring. As a local and immediate terror it has indeed haunted countless nations, who to exorcize it have appealed to countless gods. In how many famished synagogues have not the dark Talmudic solemnities against the dryness been accomplished unto Jehovah; from how many ravenous mosques has not the droned salāt for rain gone up to the steel-blue skies and Allah above them; through how many Persian temples have not the long incantations against Apaosha the drought-demon mournfully sounded for the ears of Ormazd; under how many African prayer-trees has not the magical howl for the raindrops been uttered to move Mumbo Jumbo’s stony heart? When the grass faileth, when there is no green thing, God under all these His names has been prayed to, petitioned, propitiated.

And sometimes He has been tricked. In the Spice Islands where, for that sin of incest He most abhorreth, in divine displeasure He sends as punishment torrential rains, the priests publicly organize incestuous orgies, staged contacts of horror, and then cry out: “O gods above, come, show your wrath; send rain!” The raven’s cry breaks drought⁠—his reward for that day he taught Adam bury Abel, eldest of burials⁠—and in all lands and islands, decoying famine-throats have copied his cry, till the bird’s own throat echoed, and the windows of heaven were opened.

Here and there a people has believed in the whole world’s arid end: as in old Peru. Now and then the Prophets of Israel, impartially foreseeing all unpleasant things, gave it their vote: He rebuketh the sea, and drieth up all the rivers, and everything shall wither, be driven away, and be no more.⁠ ⁠… But always having had known geographical limits in the past, drought has not often been dreaded as the total destroyer in the future. Today its adherents would be proportionately more numerous than at any hour in history before.

Gradually, through long ages, the earth is drying up. Within observable geological time, water has diminished. It is still diminishing. It will go on diminishing. We shall die parched.

Water, and with it life, will one day disappear from the globe. A usual estimate of the world area lost by water to land is some ten or eleven square miles a year. Take the measure of the seven seas, and find out how long we have.

The chief considerations urged on behalf of this diametrically opposite view are diametrical denials of the chief considerations set forth for watery triumph.

Levelling of lands is admitted, up to a point; assuaging of waters has more than kept pace.

Rain may do its share of dissolving and carrying away; much more of it penetrates through the porous earth into the lower soil, where it is crystallized, converted into hydrates, and so lost to the liquid cause. Besides, there is always less of it; the atmosphere is dryer, clouds fewer than they were. God’s rainbow promise was cynical.

Wind and sun may have destroying action; their drying action is mightier.

All coasts where the prevailing winds are landward are increased by new stretches of sand-dunes. Ocean, the supposedly all-powerful, is in open battle losing more than she gains. The waters shall fail from the sea. He hath said to the deep: Be dry.

Mere trees keep pace with her; in Florida the mangoes are thrusting out seaward in wide swamps.

Rivers may carry away. But not much of what substance they do sweep down is finally lost. More is saved for us, against oceans in the form of terrigene bands, against inland seas in the form of deltas, whereon man flourishes exceedingly, building him there most victorious cities. Behold the deltoid map: Nile’s great knee pushes northward, thrusting the Midland Sea aside; Ganges and Brahmaputra share a mouth, whose long teeth, every year longer, gnaw southward into the Gulf of Bengal; half Louisiana is but Mississippi’s sharp tongue, lapping up the Mexican Bay, prairie mud racing mango swamps to add a second jutting Florida to Dixie.

All lakes are shrivelling. Half the lakes⁠—the ex-lakes⁠—of Europe have become alluvial dry land. The other half are following. Compare the Sea of Geneva today with the Leman of Roman times; far inland from the tourist shore the old Imperial ports lie stranded.

Hand-in-hand against the water work all other terrestrial agencies.

Atmospheric agencies. The air itself is slowly dribbling off into outer space, its moisture with it.

Eruptive ones. In the period of intenser volcanic activity soon to appear, a few hundred thousand folk here and there may be killed, but the human race as a whole will win respite; the craters will spew up empires of lava, to add to our landed store. One first-class eruption alone will throw forth enough land from the bowels of the earth to make up for millenaries of erosion.

Animal ones. Mightier than earthworm for the water’s side, fight polyp and coral for the waterless. After a submarine eruption, the coral insects at once set to and build around the new-formed crater. One pink generation dies; the next one begins on the skeletons, pitilessly, as calcareous platform for its own campaign. Land peeps out. The mariner sees before him a new atoll not seen on his chart, a truly magical new island of desire. Ocean is that much the smaller.

Squarest denial is reserved for the two prime aqueous arguments.

First, that the sea has in point of evident fact gained on the land.

The land has in point of evident fact gained on the sea. Those terrestrial forests and their fossils discovered under the ocean, proving that where now is sea was land, are demonstrably less spacious than those marine deposits discovered far inland and high up, miles from the shore and thousands of feet above it; than those older sedimentary rocks, once deposited in the deeps, which now tower on the loftiest Andean cones or in highest Himalaya⁠—proving that where now is land was sea.

I’ve seen what was most solid earth before
Become a Sea, the Sea become a Shore;
Far from the Sea Sea-Cocles often lie
And Anchors old are found on Mountains high;
Land-floods have made a Valley of a Plain
And brought a Mountain with them to the Main.

Impartial Ovid! Impartial oceanography allows that both Metamorphoses occur; but the sea-receding one more largely. According to the preachers of the Six Cycles⁠—the periodical up-and-down movement of the ocean floor, first an age of tilting up and mountain-building, then an alternate age of transgressional seas and continent-sinking⁠—in the end it is the land that wins. The waters have shifted, but they have lost. The vast bulk of the Ganges delta and Gangetic plains, if it shows how vastly the Himalayas must have been lowered to build them, shows chiefly that what the heights were denuded of has not been lost for terra firma. The cyclic seas once swallowed up Gondwanaland, the old great Indian Atlantis; the aquophobe cycle replied by building up the new great peninsula of Hindustan.

Second, that there is now more water than land.

There is more land than water. It is only the trifling mass of the sea-depths that is greater than the trifling mass of the raised earth; below the deepest Pacific soundings, as below all the continents, there is solid earth right down unto the fires within. Taking the total cubic capacity of the globe, solid outnumbers liquid a multitude of times. As the earth ages and shrinks, this disproportion will augment, slow desiccation continuing till the last drop of water is dried up, till the world is a desert of dead men.

Consider also the heavens. The moon, being smaller than the earth, dried and died sooner, and now is a cloudless, sealess, waterless world, image of what we one day shall be. Venus, our younger sister, still modestly veiled in a garment of white clouds, is an image of our fresh innocence in the past, a world of young sparkling waters. Mars, our elder brother, has few clouds left to cover him; he is parching rapidly; there roll no oceans more for his warlike ships to ride on, only inland black seas, paltry Euxines. Along his two belts the thirsty deserts are spreading. They are spreading along ours. Along Cancer. Central Asia is perishing, Gobi grows; Babylon and Nineveh are under the sand, Arabia Petraea waxes. In the Holiest Land not all the gold of Zionism will make the milk and honey flow again; the waves of the Sahara now greet the waves of the sea and have long engulfed the richest granary of Rome, devouring Rome; despite Wall Street the Great American Desert remains one. Along Capricorn. The South Australian and South African and South American wastes are not receding, any more than the vaster opaline wastes on Mars. Who still has vegetation in his dried sea-bottoms, as here the last herb will sprout feebly from the parched Pacific floor.

Being made up of seven parts water in ten, from a water-losing much sooner than from a land-losing planet man is doomed to go. Before the globe was cool enough for water to appear, organic life did not exist; carbon could not combine to form the plasm. It will not exist when the globe is too cold for water to remain. An Ark for the Deluge; there’s no Ark against the Drought.

Without water, vegetation must die, and the herbiverous creatures that live on it, and we that live on them both. Surely the people is grass.

Flood certain; drought certain⁠—how far is there paradox? Thus far: that, save the Living Terror, nothing is certain.

Yet, though no certitude, both the dry-land school and the blue-water school have some chance of being justified; in the long up-and-down future of geological time one individual factor, on the one side or the other, may rise suddenly eminent above all probable calculation, and, its allies gathering insolence with it, and all of these acquiring momentum together, may be able to tilt the balance for its own side and win to time, without yet proving the opposite prophets, who also tabled on averages and likelihoods, either knaves or fools. Is it paradox to say that the average man has about equal chances of dying of thirst in Arabia or of drowning in the Atlantic, of succumbing to dropsy or disease of dryness?

Equal chances, equally remote; postponement rather than paradox. For these two hold pace with each other, cancel each other, defeat each other, in terraqueous equilibrium delay each other, until that far day when the earth, having eluded all accidents and pulled through all illnesses, will perish only, when her hour is up, of old age or its other name, the Cold.