Geologists throw around phrases about certain geological phenomena stretching back to this epoch or that. “These mountains go all the way back to the Jurassic period.”
In the particular case of an unobtrusive stream in Killarney, Ireland, it was particularly true. The observation that it went all the way back to Miocene epoch was true not only geologically, but also geographically. It began in Killarney seven million years ago and ended in Cork in an age not yet named. A person could walk along its banks, and they would experience nothing but the soothing sounds of water flowing. If a person were to enter the stream and follow its course, however, they would move forward or backward through time according to whether they went with or against the current. How much time they traversed depended entirely on where they entered the stream and how far they traveled. A person entering at the mouth in Cork could only go backward in time, and at a relatively slow pace. At the source of the river, they could only move forward, and from the center, they could move in either direction in time at a pace proportional to the distance between entering the river and either end. Many people became lost to time that way, going for a swim in the holocene epoch and freezing when they exited in the pleistocene.
Little archeological evidence of the phenomena exists, however, for of the many creatures that fell victim to the stream's choronological anomaly, very few creatures walked along in the waters of a stream for long, and thus were only mildly displaced in time, and virtually unaffected in climate. Extinction being a gradual process, the fossil record for animals didn't change much, and most modern humans, lacking in the wilderness skills and bacterial immunities of their ancestors, died before they could hope to create any signs of their anachronism.
- Originally mailed to J. Witten in Oxford, Mississippi
No comments:
Post a Comment