Chapter XIII Conclusion
The people dwelling in the mountains prayed and praised God in the midst of their peaceful habitations; only a faint echo of the terrible battle below reached their ears.
On the fourth day everything was silent. The clouds that had obscured the sky dispersed, and as the dwellers among the glaciers looked down from their mountains, lo! a great ocean extended before and around them—a serene and silent watery mirror, whose wide horizon was conterminous with the vast firmament—mountain, valley, continent, what had become of them? whither had they vanished?
The eleven glaciers were also separated by the waters, and had become eleven islands. The whole mass had sank insensibly some thousands of feet. The warmer atmosphere of the lower regions had begun to melt the layers of eternal snow, and a new life—a new vegetation—was developing. On the first spot left clear by the snow Bar Noemi planted a linden—under the shadow of which he erected his hut, and the larger the leafy tabernacle grew the greater grew Bar Noemi’s family, and God’s blessing grew with it.
The group of these eleven mountains form the Canary Islands. Of all that vast continent, these mountains alone remain. Their fauna and flora, the conformation of their coasts, prove that this group of islands is merely the remnant of a submerged world.
Their later discoverers perceived with astonishment that a peculiar race of people inhabited these remotely situated islands—a race hardier and comelier than the men of other nations; a race intelligent and virtuous, which adored an invisible God, was chaste in its love, simple in its life, and content with its lot. It believed in the resurrection of the body, for it embalmed its dead, and laid them in funeral vaults. Moreover, it possessed the arts, and had an alphabet of its own, unlike that of any other people in the world.
This group of islands, moreover, possessed two other most wondrous kinds of inhabitants—a race of dogs and of yellow sparrows. Singular enough, both these species of animals remain dumb in the place of their birth, as if some vow prevented them from uttering a word; but they recover their voices if removed to other climes. The tiny canary birds—those gentle, amiable, sprightly songsters come from here. This is their proper home. With us they sing as sweetly, as meltingly as once they sang in Triton’s luxurious city, and many a heart has been saddened by their songs without exactly knowing why.
The linden-tree planted by Bar Noemi still stands on the island of Ferro, whence the geographers draw the first meridian. The tree, which measures 160 feet in circumference, is already two thousand years old, and whole communities repose beneath its branches. Travellers tell us that the leaves of this tree imbibe the atmospheric vapours, and then distil them upon the earth below, thus watering the waterless island night and day. Even to this day the inhabitants hold the tree holy.
Between Europe and the New World there now extends the infinity of a vast ocean, and whoever thinks about it at all must needs say to himself that a whole continent is missing there. Plato has described it; Solon has sung of it; the Arabs speak of it in their fables, and the Carthaginians forbade it to be mentioned under pain of death—what more do we want? It must have existed!
Now, however, white sails fly over it.
But often, when a calm prevails on the ocean, and the dreamy mariner is brooding over the past, wondrous phenomena reveal themselves in the heated air before his eyes. On the dun-coloured horizon appear the dim outlines of cities with towers turned upside down, whole palm-forests with their crowns reversed. Wondrous, magnificent shapes are these, of which the existing world knows nothing, and these inimitable edifices, these boldly aspiring cupolas and domes undergo the strangest metamorphoses before the eyes of the astonished seafarer, till a light breeze in an instant dissolves the whole panorama, and nothing is visible around the rocking ship but the endless, the interminable sea.