Creatures of the Kingdom: Stories of Animals and Nature, Page 2

  For nearly forty million years, an extent of time so vast that it is almost meaningless, only the ocean knew that an island was building below its surface. For nearly forty million years, from that extensive rupture in the ocean floor, liquid rock seeped out in small amounts, forcing its way up through what had escaped before and contributing to the accumulation that was building on the floor of the sea. Sometimes a thousand or ten thousand years would pass before any new eruption of material would take place. At other times gigantic pressures would accumulate beneath the permanent rupture and with unimaginable violence rush through the existing apertures, throwing clouds of steam miles above the surface of the ocean. Waves would be generated that would circle the globe and crash upon themselves as they collided twelve thousand miles away. Such an explosion, indescribable in its fury, might in the end raise the height of the suboceanic island a foot.

  For the most part, the slow constant seepage of molten rock was not violently dramatic. Layer upon layer of the earth’s vital core would exude, hiss when it met the cold seawater, and then slide down the sides of the mountains, for this bound together what had gone before, and established a base for what was to come

  And then one day, at the northwest end of the suboceanic rupture, an eruption of liquid rock occurred that was different from any others that had preceded it. It threw forth the same kind of rock with the same violence and through the same vents in the earth’s core, but this time what was erupted reached the surface of the sea. There was a tremendous explosion as the liquid rock struck water and air together. Clouds of steam rose miles into the air. Ash fell hissing upon the heaving waves. Detonations shattered the air for a moment and then echoed away in the immensity of the empty wastes.

  But rock had at last been deposited above the surface of the sea. An island had risen from the deep.

  In the long history of the ocean many such piles had momentarily broken the surface and then become submerged again. What was significant about the initial appearance of this first island along the slanting crack was the fact that it held on and grew. Stubbornly, inch by inch, it grew. In fact, it was the uncertainty and agony of its growth that were significant, and only by relentless effort did it establish its right to exist. For the first ten thousand years after its tentative emergence, the little pile of rock in the center of the sea fluctuated between life and death. Sometimes molten lava would rise through the internal channels and erupt from a vent only a few inches above the waves. Tons upon tons of material would gush forth and hiss madly before falling back into the ocean. Some, fortunately, would cling to the newborn island, adding many feet to its formation.

  Then from the south, where storms breed in the deep, a mighty wave would form and rush across the world. Its coming would be visible from afar, and in gigantic, tumbling, whistling, screaming power it would fall upon the little accumulations of rocks before surging past.

  For the next ten thousand years there would be no visible island, yet under the waves, always ready to spring back to life, there would rest this huge mountain, rising nineteen thousand feet from the floor of the ocean, and when a new series of volcanic thrusts tore through the vents, the mountain would patiently build itself for another try at breaking through the surface. Exploding, hissing and spewing forth ash, the great mountain would writhe in convulsions as it tried to pierce the waves. Its island would be born again.

  This was the restless surge of the universe, the violence of birth, the cold tearing away of death; and yet how promising was this interplay of forces as an island struggled to be born, vanishing in agony and then soaring aloft in triumph.

  For a million years the island hung in a precarious balance, a child of violence; but finally it was firmly established. Now each new lava flow had a solid base upon which to build, and inch by inch the debris agglutinated until the island could be seen by birds from long distances. It was indeed land, habitable for men had there been any then existing, with shelters for boats, had there been boats, and with rocks that could have been used for building homes. It was now an island, in the real sense of the word, taking its rightful place in the center of the great ocean.

  But before life could prosper on this island, soil was needed, and as yet none existed. When molten lava burst upon the air it generally exploded into ash, but sometimes it ran as a viscous fluid down the sides of mountains, constructing extensive sheets of flat rock. The action of wind and rain and cooling nights began to pulverize the newly born lava, decomposing it into soil. When enough had accumulated, the island was ready to support life.

  The first living forms to arrive were inconspicuous, indeed almost invisible—lichens and low types of moss. They were borne by the sea and by winds that howled back and forth across the oceans. With a tenacity equal to that of the island itself these fragments of life established themselves, and as they grew they broke down more rocks and built more soil.

  At this time on the distant continents separated by the ocean there was a well-established plant and animal society composed of trees and animals and insects. Some of these forms would have adapted easily to life on the new island but were prevented from taking residence by two thousand miles of open ocean.

  The first sentient animals to reach the island were fish, for they were everywhere in the ocean, coming and going as they wished. But they could not be said to be a part of the island. The first nonoceanic animal to visit was a bird. It probably came from the north on an exploratory mission in search of food. It landed on the still-warm rocks, found nothing edible, and flew on, perhaps to perish in the southern seas.

  A thousand years passed, and no other birds arrived. One day a coconut was swept ashore by a violent storm. It had been kept afloat on the bosom of the sea by its buoyant husk, traveling more than three thousand miles from the southwest, a marvel of persistence. But when it landed, it found no soil along the shore and only salt water, so it perished, but its husk and shell helped form soil for those that would come later.

  The years passed. The sun swept through its majestic cycles. The moon waxed and waned, and tides rushed back and forth across the surface of the world. Ice crept down from the north, and for ten thousand years covered the islands, its weight and power breaking down rocks and forming earth.

  The years passed, the empty, endless, significant years. And then one day another bird arrived on the island, also seeking food. This time it found a few dead fish along the shore. When it emptied its bowels on the waiting earth it evacuated a tiny seed that it had eaten on some remote island. The seed germinated and grew. Thus, after the passage of eons of time, growing life established itself on the rocky island.

  Now the passage of time becomes incomprehensible. Between the arrival of the first, unproductive bird, and the second bearing the vital seed, more than twenty thousand years had elapsed. In another twenty thousand years another form of life arrived—a female insect, fertilized on some distant island on the night before a tremendous storm. Caught up in the vast winds that howled from the south, she was borne aloft to a height of ten thousand feet and driven northward for more than two thousand miles to be dropped at last upon this new and remote island, where she gave birth to the first insect native to the island.

  The years passed. Other birds arrived, but they bore no seeds. Other insects were blown ashore, but they were not females or, if they were, they were not pregnant. But once every twenty or thirty thousand years—a period longer than that of historic man—some bit of life would reach the island by accident, and by accident it would establish itself. In this hit-or-miss way, over a period of time that the mind can barely grasp, life populated the island.

  It was one of the most significant days in the history of the island when a bird staggered in from some land far to the southwest, bearing in its tangled feathers the seed of a tree. Perched upon a rock, the bird pecked at the seed until it fell on the soil, and in the course of time a tree grew. Thirty thousand years passed, and by yet another accident, the seed of another tree arrived,
and after a million years of sheer chance, after five million years of storms and birds and drifting sea-soaked logs bearing snails and borers, the island finally had a forest with flowers and birds and insects.

  Nothing, nothing that ever existed on this island reached it easily. The rocks were forced up fiery chimneys through miles of ocean to burst onto the surface of the earth. The lichens that arrived came borne by storms. The birds limped in on deadened wings. Insects came only with hurricanes, and the seeds of trees arrived in the belly of some exhausted wandering bird.

  Timelessly, relentlessly, in wind and rain the island was given life, and this life was sustained by constant volcanic eruptions that spewed forth lava that broke down into life-sustaining soil. In violence the island evolved, and in violence great beauty emerged.

  The shores of the island, weathered by the sea, were stupendous cliffs that caught the evening sun and glowed like serrated pillars of gold. The mountains were tall and jagged, their lower levels clothed in dark green trees, their upper pinnacles glittering with ice, while the calm bays in which the grandeur of the mountains was reflected were deeply cut into the shore. Valleys and plains, waterfalls and rivers, glades where lovers would have walked, and splendid sites where towns could have been built, the lovely island had all these assets, these alluring invitations to civilization. But no man ever saw them, and the tempting glades entertained no lovers, for the island had risen to its beauty long, long before the age of man; and at the moment of its greatest perfection it began to die. In violence it had been born; in violence it would die.

  There was a sudden shudder of the earth, a slipping and a sliding, and after a period of thousands of years, the island had sunk hundreds of feet lower into the ocean, and ice nevermore formed upon its crests. The volcanoes stopped erupting, and no lava poured forth to create new soil to replace what had sunk into the sea. For a million years winds howled at the hills, the ocean gnawed away at the ramparts. The island began to shred away, to shatter and to fall back into the ocean from which it had sprung.

  A million years passed, and then a million more, and the island that had grown so patiently at the northwest tip of the great crack in the ocean floor began to slowly, slowly vanish. The birds that had fed upon its hills went elsewhere, bearing in their bowels new seeds. From its shore fertilized insects were storm-blown to other islands, and life went on. Once every twenty or thirty thousand years some fragment of nature escaped from this island, and life went on.

  But as the island subsided, a different form of life sprang into increased activity. In the warm, clear, nutritious waters that surrounded the shores, coral polyps began to flourish, and slowly they left behind them as they died their tiny calciferous skeletons a few feet below the surface of the sea. In a thousand years they built a submerged ring around the island. In a thousand more years they added to its form, and as the eons passed, these tiny coral animals built a reef.

  Ice melted in the north, and the coral animals were drowned, overcome by the unprecedented weight of the water. The seas’ temperature dropped precipitously and the animals died. Torrents of rain poured down from island hills and silted up the shoreline, strangling the tiny coral. Or new ice caps formed far to the north and south, pulling water away from the dying island. The coral reef was exposed and it died.

  Like everything to do with this island, throughout its entire history, the coral lived precariously, poised between catastrophes and always building. And so it was that these tiny animals built a new island to replace the old as it gradually wore itself away and sank into the sea.

  How terrible this passage of life and death! How meaningless that an island that had been born of such force and violence, that had been so fair, so willing to accommodate man should he ever arrive … how sad it was that this island had grown in agony and died in agony before ever a human eye had seen its majesty.

  For more than ten million years, the island existed silently in the unknown sea and then died, leaving only a fringe of coral where seabirds rested and gigantic seals played. Ceaseless life and death, endless expenditure of beauty and capacity, tireless ebb and flow and rising and subsidence of the ocean. Night comes and the burning day, and the island waits, and no man arrives. The days perish and the nights, and the aching beauty of lush valleys and waterfalls vanishes, and no man will ever see them. All that will remain is a coral reef, a calcium wreath on the surface of the great sea that had given the island life, a memorial erected by the skeletons of a billion billion billion little animals.

  Such coral reefs, when they form a circle in the sea—and there are hundreds of them in the Pacific—are a distinctive and beautiful feature of this ocean. A typical one might protect a circular lagoon two miles in diameter with no land in the middle. Others, of equal size, will have rising from their center remnants of the original volcano that built the island along whose flanks the coral built their reefs. Such a combination—a rugged volcano remnant two thousand feet high rising from the middle of a lagoon and surrounded by a perfect circular reef with only one opening to the outside ocean—can be a magical place, none more so than Bora Bora, the most enchanting island in the world.

  While the first island was rising to prominence and dying back to nothingness, other would-be islands, stretching away to the southeast, were also struggling to attain brief existence followed by certain death. Some started their cycle within the same million years as did the first. Others lagged. The latest would not pierce the surface of the sea until the first was well into its death throes, so that at any moment from the time the first island began to die, man, had he then existed, could have witnessed in this two-thousand-mile chain of islands every sequential step in the process of creation and disintegration.

  Like an undulating wave of the sea itself, the rocky islands rose and fell; but whereas the cycle of an ocean wave lasts a few minutes at the most; the cycle of the rise and fall of these islands took about sixty million years. Each island, at any given moment of time, existed certainly and securely within that cycle: it was either rising toward birth and significance or it was perishing. If man had been able to witness the cycle, he could not have identified which part of the cycle a given island was in. But the impersonal, molten center of the earth knew, for it was sending that island no new supplies of lava. The waiting sea knew, for it could feel the cliffs falling into its arms a little more easily. And the coral polyps seemed to know, because they sensed that it was now time to start erecting a memorial to this island, which would soon be dead—that is, within twenty or thirty million years.

  Endless cycle, endless birth and death, endless becoming and disappearing. Once the terrifying volcanic explosions ceased on any island, that island was already doomed: a new ice age was beginning, which would freeze out all life. Limitless cycle, endless change.

  After the first rupture had produced an island that kept its head above water permanently, a miracle occurred that was one of the wonders of our planet. As the rupture remained fixed in the crust of the earth, far below the surface of the sea, a constant supply of new magma available for the formation of new islands continued to pour out for millions of uninterrupted years. But now the great subterranean plate of rock on which the Pacific Ocean rests continued its inexorable creeping movement that began with the creation of our planet and will presumably continue as long as the earth exists. It edges a fragment of a millimeter each decade, forever in a northwest direction, 290 degrees on a compass, but always this deeply hidden Hot Spot, as it came to be called, remains exactly where it originally broke through.

  This explains what happened in the construction of these beautiful islands in the middle of the Pacific. The first one, whose birth I have just described, is located at the extreme northwest of the chain; it was relatively small and would bear the name Niihau. It required millions of years to build, but when it was safely above the surface of the sea, it was carried off by the drifting of the plate, always to the northwest to vacate the Hot Spot so the future Kauai could be
built by the same process. When this new island wandered off, its place was taken by Oahu, and four others in turn. But always the Hot Spot remained in place, so that when mankind finally reached the islands, it was busy creating the biggest of all, the island of Hawaii itself, with its two massive active volcanoes proving that it still stood directly above the Hot Spot. However, since new islands appear to be aborning beneath the surface of the ocean, perhaps even huge Hawaii is already moving off the Hot Spot and joining the other islands in this beautiful fleet as they continue their predestined journey away from the United States and toward Japan.

  Toward the end of the master cycle, when the western islands were dying and the eastern ones were abuilding, a new volcano pushed its cone above the surface of the ocean, and in a series of titanic explosions erupted enough molten rock to establish securely a new island, which after eons would be designated by men as Oahu, capital island of the group. Its subsequent volcanic history was memorable in that its habitable land resulted from the wedding of two separate chains of volcanoes.

  After the parent volcano had succeeded in establishing an island, its mighty flanks produced many subsidiary vents through which lava poured. Then a greater volcano, separated from the first by miles of ocean, sprang into being and erected its own majestic construction.

  For eons the two massive volcano systems stood in the sea in fiery competition, and then, inevitably, the first began to die back, its fires extinguished, while the second continued to pour millions of tons of lava down its own steep flanks. Hissing, exploding, crackling, the rocks fell into the sea in boundless accumulations, building the later volcano ever more solidly, ever more thickly at its base on the remote floor of the ocean.

  In time, sinking lava from the second master builder began to creep across the feet of the first, and then to climb its sides and finally to throw itself across the exposed lava flows that had constituted the earlier island. Now the void in the sea that had separated the two was filled, and they became one. Locked in fiery arms, joined by intertwining ejaculations of molten rock, the two volcanoes stood in matrimony, their union a single fruitful and growing island.