The Thames Valley Catastrophe | Page 2

scale worthy
of a great country, I can tell you. Europe is a circumstance: America is
a continent."
"But surely," I objected, "that was a pretty fair eruption that destroyed
Pompeii!"
The American rose and surveyed me slowly. I can see him to this day,
with his close-shaven face and his contemptuous smile at my European
ignorance. "Well," he said, after a long and impressive pause, "the
lava-flood that destroyed a few acres about the Bay of Naples was what
we call a trickle: it came from a crater; and the crater it came from was
nothing more than a small round vent-hole; the lava flowed down from
it in a moderate stream over a limited area. But what do you say to the
earth opening in a huge crack, forty or fifty miles long--say, as far as
from here right away to London, or farther--and lava pouring out from
the orifice, not in a little rivulet as at Etna or Vesuvius, but in a sea or
inundation, which spread at once over a tract as big as England? That's
something like volcanic action, isn't it? And that's the sort of thing we
have out in Colorado."
"You are joking," I replied, "or bragging. You are trying to astonish me
with the familiar spread eagle."
He smiled a quiet smile. "Not a bit of it," he answered. "What I tell you
is at least as true as Gospel. The earth yawns in Montana. There are
fissure-eruptions, as we call them, in the Western States, out of which
the lava has welled like wine out of a broken skin--welled up in vast
roaring floods, molten torrents of basalt, many miles across, and spread
like water over whole plains and valleys."
"Not within historical times!" I exclaimed.

"I'm not so sure about that," he answered, musing. "I grant you, not
within times which are historical right there--for Colorado is a very
new country: but I incline to think some of the most recent fissure
eruptions took place not later than when the Tudors reigned in England.
The lava oozed out, red-hot--gushed out--was squeezed out-- and
spread instantly everywhere; it's so comparatively recent that the
surface of the rock is still bare in many parts, unweathered sufficiently
to support vegetation. I fancy the stream must have been ejected at a
single burst, in a huge white-hot dome, and then flowed down on every
side, filling up the valleys to a certain level, in and out among the hills,
exactly as water might do. And some of these eruptions, I tell you, by
measured survey, would have covered more ground than from Dover to
Liverpool, and from York to Cornwall."
"Let us be thankful," I said, carelessly, "that such things don't happen in
our own times."
He eyed me curiously. "Haven't happened, you mean," he answered.
"We have no security that they mayn't happen again to-morrow. These
fissure-eruptions, though not historically described for us, are common
events in geological history--commoner and on a larger scale in
America than elsewhere. Still, they have occurred in all lands and at
various epochs; there is no reason at all why one shouldn't occur in
England at present."
I laughed, and shook my head. I had the Englishman's firm conviction--
so rudely shattered by the subsequent events, but then so universal--
that nothing very unusual ever happened in England.
Next morning I rose early, bathed in Odney Weir (a picturesque pool
close by), breakfasted with the American, and then wrote a hasty line to
my wife, informing her that I should probably sleep that night at
Oxford; for I was off on a few days' holiday, and I liked Ethel to know
where a letter or telegram would reach me each day, as we were both a
little anxious about the baby's teething. Even while I pen these words
now, the grim humour of the situation comes back to me vividly.
Thousands of fathers and mothers were anxious that morning about
similar trifles, whose pettiness was brought home to them with an

appalling shock in the all-embracing horror of that day's calamity.
About ten o'clock I inflated my tyres and got under way. I meant to ride
towards Oxford by a leisurely and circuitous route, along the windings
of the river, past Marlow and Henley; so I began by crossing Cookham
Bridge, a wooden or iron structure, I scarcely remember which. It
spanned the Thames close by the village: the curious will find its exact
position marked in the maps of the period.
In the middle of the bridge, I paused and surveyed that charming
prospect, which I was the last of living men perhaps to see as it then
existed. Close by stood a weir; beside it, the stream divided into three
separate branches, exquisitely backed up by the