Letter V
Noah began to collect
animals. There was to be one couple of each and every sort of creature that
walked or crawled, or swam or flew, in the world of animated nature. We
have to guess at how long it took to collect the creatures and how much
it cost, for there is no record of these details. When Symmachus made preparation
to introduce his young son to grown-up life in imperial Rome, he sent men
to Asia, Africa and everywhere to collect wild animals for the arena-fights.
It took the men three years to accumulate the animals and fetch them to
Rome. Merely quadrupeds and alligators, you understand -- no birds, no snakes,
no frogs, no worms, no lice, no rats, no fleas, no ticks, no caterpillars,
no spiders, no houseflies, no mosquitoes -- nothing but just plain simple
quadrupeds and alligators: and no quadrupeds except fighting ones. Yet it
was as I have said: it took three years to collect them, and the cost of
animals and transportation and the men's wages footed up $4,500,000.
How many animals?
We do not know. But it was under five thousand, for that was the largest
number ever gathered for those Roman shows, and it was Titus, not Symmachus,
who made that collection. Those were mere baby museums, compared to Noah's
contract. Of birds and beasts and fresh-water creatures he had to collect
146,000 kinds; and of insects upwards of two million species.
Thousands and thousands
of those things are very difficult to catch, and if Noah had not given
up and resigned, he would be on the job yet, as Leviticus used to say.
However, I do not mean that he withdrew. No, he did not do that. He gathered
as many creatures as he had room for, and then stopped.
If he had known all
the requirements in the beginning, he would have been aware that what
was needed was a fleet of Arks. But he did not know how many kinds of
creatures there were, neither did his Chief. So he had no Kangaroo, and
no 'possom, and no Gila monster, and no ornithorhynchus, and lacked a
multitude of other indispensable blessings which a loving Creator had
provided for man and forgotten about, they having long ago wandered to
a side of this world which he had never seen and with whose affairs he
was not acquainted. And so everyone of them came within a hair of getting
drowned.
They only escaped
by an accident. There was not water enough to go around. Only enough was
provided to flood one small corner of the globe -- the rest of the globe
was not then known, and was supposed to be nonexistent.
However, the thing
that really and finally and definitely determined Noah to stop with enough
species for purely business purposes and let the rest become extinct,
was an incident of the last days: an excited stranger arrived with some
most alarming news. He said he had been camping among some mountains and
valleys about six hundred miles away, and he had seen a wonderful thing
there: he stood upon a precipice overlooking a wide valley, and up the
valley he was a billowy black sea of strange animal life coming. Presently
the creatures passed by, struggling, fighting, scrambling, screeching,
snorting -- horrible vast masses of tumultuous flesh! Sloths as big as
an elephant; frogs as big as a cow; a megatherium and his harem huge beyond
belief; saurians and saurians and saurians, group after group, family
after family, species after species -- a hundred feet long, thirty feet
high, and twice as quarrelsome; one of them hit a perfectly blameless
Durham bull a thump with its tail and sent it whizzing three hundred feet
into the air and it fell at the man's feet with a sigh and was no more.
The man said that these prodigious animals had heard about the Ark and
were coming. Coming to get saved from the flood. And not coming in pairs,
they were all coming: they did not know the passengers were restricted
to pairs, the man said, and wouldn't care a rap for the regulations, anyway
-- they would sail in that Ark or know the reason why. The man said the
Ark would not hold the half of them; and moreover they were coming hungry,
and would eat up everything there was, including the menagerie and the
family.
All these facts were
suppressed, in the Biblical account. You find not a hint of them there.
The whole thing is hushed up. Not even the names of those vast creatures
are mentioned. It shows you that when people have left a reproachful vacancy
in a contract they can be as shady about it in Bibles as elsewhere. Those
powerful animals would be of inestimable value to man now, when transportation
is so hard pressed and expensive, but they are all lost to him. All lost,
and by Noah's fault. They all got drowned. Some of them as much as eight
million years ago.
Very well, the stranger
told his tale, and Noah saw that he must get away before the monsters
arrived. He would have sailed at once, but the upholsterers and decorators
of the housefly's drawing room still had some finishing touches to put
on, and that lost him a day. Another day was lost in getting the flies
aboard, there being sixty-eight billions of them and the Deity still afraid
there might not be enough. Another day was lost in stowing forty tons
of selected filth for the flies' sustenance.
Then at last, Noah
sailed; and none too soon, for the Ark was only just sinking out of sight
on the horizon when the monsters arrived, and added their lamentations
to those of the multitude of weeping fathers and mothers and frightened
little children who were clinging to the wave-washed rocks in the pouring
rain and lifting imploring prayers to an All-Just and All-Forgiving and
All-Pitying Being who had never answered a prayer since those crags were
builded, grain by grain, out of the sands, and would still not have answered
one when the ages should have crumbled them to sand again.
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