Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/269

Rh all; while the more modern view would appear to be that since so many discredited legends have been found to enshrine some important truth, all are to be assumed trustworthy till they are proved otherwise.

It may be in this spirit that Suess has elaborately discussed the Chaldean legend as though it presented us with a trustworthy account of the Mesopotamian deluge.

Reasoning from the facts as it records them, Suess lays great stress on the course taken by the ship from Surippak, supposed to have been situated near the mouth of the Euphrates, to the land of Nizir, a distance of about two hundred and forty miles up stream. Had the flood been produced solely by heavy rainfall and a consequent overflowing of the swollen rivers, the ship instead of being carried inland would have been drifted out to sea—i. e., southward into the Persian Gulf. Suess therefore suggests that a great wave was produced in the Persian Gulf, partly by a cyclone and partly by an earthquake. This wave of twofold origin then rolled in upon the low-lying land of Mesopotamia, and drove its floods of water up the valley till they washed the foot of the Nizir hills.

Of all catastrophes none are more terrible, none more disastrous than those thus produced. When the shock of an earthquake occurs beneath the sea, and affects the adjacent land, a trembling of the ground is first felt, then the sea retires and leaves the beach bare, only to return in a long, mighty wave which breaks with violence on the shore. Thus on October 28, 1746, Callao in Peru, after being shaken by an earthquake, was overwhelmed by a sea wave and utterly destroyed; of its five thousand inhabitants only two hundred survived the flood. Still more destructive was the famous earthquake of Lisbon, November 1, 1755, when the inhabitants, without a warning, were destroyed in the falling city, and in six minutes sixty thousand persons perished. The sea in this case, as in others, retired first, and then rose fifty feet or more above its usual level, swamping the boats in the harbor; at Cadiz the wave is said to have reached a height of sixty feet, and it was felt over the greater part of the North Atlantic Ocean, arriving even on our own shores, as at Kinsale in Ireland, where it rushed into the harbor and poured into the market place.

That a great sea wave so produced might have thus arisen in the Persian Gulf is quite within the bounds of possibility, particularly as a zone of the earth's crust, very liable to earthquakes, stretches across the mouth of the gulf near the Ormus Mountains.

But if we are to follow the legend, we must follow it faithfully, and as a result of the most recent investigations it turns out that all the passages which were supposed to refer to an