NONSUCH 



fish had dashed past, and twice I glanced obhquely 

 upward, half expecting to see the keel of a boat as 

 when I am submerged in the diving helmet. I could 

 breathe only by keeping my head well down. Every 

 portion of my body was wet, so having nothing for 

 comparison, I was not conscious of moisture. At 

 first I had been aware of dripping and splashing 

 and the slap of waves, but these, by interminable 

 repetition, had become part of underwater silence. 



I might have been the last of the evil pre- 

 Noahites, about to slip into oblivion. And then 

 even this conceit left me, and I attained a damp 

 Nirvana ; hunger, cold, wetness, boredom were for- 

 gotten, and I was an utterly inadequate but ap- 

 preciative mind looking on at the birth of Bermuda. 



Students of the planets and of our jolly, round, 

 whirling earth have given us an estimate of cosmic 

 evolution considerably longer than that of the 

 Bible. I have known days, indeed, which seemed like 

 eternity, and Einstein tells us that space annihilates 

 both ether and time. Still the human mind likes to 

 mumble definite figures, even though they are far 

 beyond actual appreciation. So I recalled with 

 moist satisfaction that the birth of the seven seas 

 must have been somewhere around a billion years 

 ago. This seemed ancient even to me on my oceanic 

 pedestal, and my mind flew ahead to the time, 

 twenty or thirty millions of years ago, when the 

 volcanos of the western Atlantic began to push and 

 boil upward. Unlike the usual cluster of such out- 

 bursts, that of Burmuda was solitary in mid-ocean. 



4 



