42 A VALLEY IN CLOUDLAND 



PART VII. THE CHANGING LAND. 



The North Sea is only a recent flood in an 

 old river valley. We must consider it not as 

 a tract of permanent water, but as a lost hunt- 

 ing ground of our own ancestors, a pasturage 

 for horses not very long ago. 



In the year 5200 b.c. the Scandinavian 

 glaciers, shrinking at the rate of about one mile 

 a year (the rate of shrinkage in the Alps of 

 St. Elias), withdrew from the province of Fin- 

 land and the Baltic Lake. Let us suppose 

 that, in that year a traveller from civilised 

 Egypt made his way down the Rhine, and so 

 entered the valley of North River, which is 

 now flooded by the North Sea. At first this 

 river wound its level way between low chalk 

 downs, but presently the Thames came in 

 from the West, and forested sw^ampy clay- 

 lands extended northward. Abreast of Aber- 

 deen came the last chalk downs, and beyond that 

 lay Arctic tundras where the delta widened 

 to an ice-drifted sea nearly abreast of Faroe. 



The whole valley was as varied in rock and 

 soil as Eastern England, with little lakes, 

 ridges of boulder clay, and downs of gorse and 

 bracken. Northward across this verdant land 

 crept succeeding waves of the fir, the oak, and 

 the beech. 



