GEOLOGIES AND DELUGES. 257 



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 sug- 

 gests that a great wave was produced in the Persian Gulf, partly 

 by a cj'clone 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 disas- 

 trous than those thus produced. When the shock of an earth- 

 quake 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, Novem- 

 ber 1, 1755, when the inhabitants, without a warning, were de- 

 stroyed in the falling city, and in six minutes sixty thousand per- 

 sons 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, partic- 

 ularly 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 faith- 

 fully, and as a result of the most recent investigations it turns 

 out that all the passages which were supposed to refer to an 



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