Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 2).djvu/537

 many phenomena by fire and water; but could they know what was passing between earth and heaven when all my dust, cast by wind from the abyss, has formed solid clouds, which clouds of water have rolled in their stormy whirl, which thunder has penetrated with its mysterious loadstone, and which the stronger winds have thrown upon a terrestrial surface in torrential rains? There is the origin of the first deposits. You are going to witness these marvellous transformations."

We mounted higher, and came to chalks, marbles, and banks of limestone enough to build a city as big as the entire globe.

And as I was wondering at what she was able to produce by sifting, agglomerating, metamorphosing, and baking, she said to me:

"All that is nothing ; you are going to see a great deal more than that—you are going to see life, already hatched in the middle of these stones."

She approached a basin wide as a sea, and, plunging her arms into it, drew from it—first, strange plants, then animals, stranger still, which were as yet half plants; then beings, free and independent of one another, living shells; then, at last, fish, which she made leap, saying as she did so:

"That's what Dame Dust knows how to produce, when she pleases, at the bottom of water. But there's something better than that. Turn round and look at the shore."

I turned. The calcar and all its components, mixed with flint and clay, had formed on the surface a fine brown and rich dust, out of which had sprung fibrous plants of singular form.

"That is vegetable earth," said the Fairy. "Wait a little while, and you will see trees growing."

I then saw an arborescent vegetation rise rapidly from the ground and people itself with reptiles and insects, while on the shore unknown creatures crawled and darted about, and caused me great terror.

"These animals will not alarm you on the earth of the future," said the Fairy. "They are destined to manure it with their remains. There are not yet any human beings here to fear them."

"Hold!" I cried; "here is a world of monsters that shock me! Here is your earth belonging to these devouring crea-