ove, mercy, gentleness,
altruism; but I know them not. Your prayers will fall upon ears of
stone, your appealing gesture upon eyes of stone, your cries for mercy
upon hearts of stone. I shall be neither your enemy nor your friend. I
shall be utterly indifferent to you. My floods will drown you, my winds
wreck you, my fires burn you, my quicksands suck you down, and not know
what they are doing. My earth is a theatre of storms and cyclones, of
avalanches and earthquakes, of lightnings and cloudbursts; wrecks and
ruins strew my course. All my elements and forces are at your service;
all my fluids and gases and solids; my stars in their courses will fight
on your side, if you put and keep yourself in right relations to them.
My atoms and electrons will build your houses, my lightning do your
errands, my winds sail your ships, on the same terms. You cannot live
without my air and my water and my warmth; but each of them is a source
of power that will crush or engulf or devour you before it will turn one
hair's-breadth from its course. Your trees will be uprooted by my
tornadoes, your fair fields will be laid waste by floods or fires; my
mountains will fall on your delicate forms and utterly crush and bury
them; my glaciers will overspread vast areas and banish or destroy whole
tribes and races of your handiwork; the shrinking and wrinkling crust of
my earth will fold in its insensate bosom vast forests of your tropical
growths, and convert them into black rock, and I will make rock of the
myriad forms of minute life with which you plant the seas; through
immense geologic ages my relentless, unseeing, unfeeling forces will
drive on like the ploughshare that buries every flower and grass-blade
and tiny creature in its path. My winds are life-giving breezes to-day,
and the besom of destruction to-morrow; my rains will moisten and
nourish you one day, and wash you into the gulf the next; my earthquakes
will bury your cities as if they were ant-hills. So you must take your
chances, but the chances are on your side. I am not all tempest, or
flood, or fire, or earthquake. Your career will be a warfare, but you
will win more battles than you will lose. But remember, you are nothing
to me, while I am everything to you. I have nothing to lose or gain,
while you have everything to gain. Without my soils and moisture and
warmth, without my carbon and oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen, you can
do or be nothing; without my sunshine you peri