vii HASISADRA'S ADVENTURE 267 



civilisation. On the other hand, if the Penta- 

 teuchal story only means something quite 

 different, that happened somewhere else, thou- 

 sands of years earlier, dressed up, what becomes 

 of its credit as history ? I wonder what would be 

 said to a modern historian who asserted that 

 Pekin was burnt down in 1886, and then tried to 

 justify the assertion by adducing evidence of the 

 Great Fire of London in 1666. Yet the attempt 

 to save the credit of the Noachian story by refer- 

 ence to something which is supposed to have 

 happened in the far north, in the glacial epoch, is 

 far more preposterous. 



Moreover, these dust-raising dialecticians ignore 

 some of the most important and well-known facts 

 which bear upon the question. Anything more 

 than a parochial acquaintance with physical 

 geography and geology would suffice to remind its 

 possessor that the Holy Land itself offers a stand- 

 ing protest against bringing such a deluge as that 

 of Noah anywhere near it, either in historical 

 times or in the course of that pleistocene period, 

 of which the '* great ice age " formed a part. 



Judaea and Galilee, Moab and Gilead, occupy 

 part of that extensive tableland at the summit of 

 the western boundary of the Euphrates valley, to 

 which I have already referred. If that valley 

 had ever been filled with water to a height 

 sufficient, not indeed to cover a third of Ararat, in 

 the north, or half of some of the mountains of the 



