Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel
OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED. 395
and the race gradually spread to Europe, Africa, and America.
“ But,” says one, “ how long did all this take?”
Who shall say? It may have been days, weeks, months, years, centuries. The Toltec legends say that their ancestors wandered for more than a hundred years in the darkness.
The torrent-torn face of the earth ; the vast rearrangement of the Drift materials by rivers, compared with which our own rivers are rills; the vast continental regions which were evidently flooded, all testify to an extraordinary amount of moisture first raised up from the seas and then cast down on the lands. Given heat enough to raise this mass, given the cold caused by its evaporation, given the time necessary for the great battle between this heat and this condensation, given the time to restore this body of water to the ocean, not once but many times,—for, along the southern border of the floods, where Muspelheim and Niffheim met, the heat must have sucked up the water as fast almost as it fell, to fall again, and again to be lifted up, until the heat-area was driven back and water fell, at last, everywhere on the earth’s face, and the extraordinary evaporation ceased,—this was a gigantic, long-continued battle.
But it may be asked :
“Suppose further study should disclose the fact that the Drift zs found in Siberia and the rest of Asia, and over all the world, what then?”
Tt will not disprove my theory. It will simply indicate that the débris did not, as I have supposed, strike the earth instantaneously, but that it continued to fall during twenty-four hours. If the comet was split into fragments, if there was the “ Midgard-Serpent” as well as the