ll very slowly--at a rate of only a few inches
a day--until the top of the mountain on which it rested became visible.
This is an amount of movement which, if it took place in the sea, would
be overlooked by ordinary people on the shore. But the Mesopotamian
plain slopes gently, from an elevation of 500 or 600 feet at its
northern end, to the sea, at its southern end, with hardly so much as a
notable ridge to break its uniform flatness, for 300 to 400 miles.
These being the conditions of the case, the following inquiry naturally
presents itself: not, be it observed, as a recondite problem, generated
by modern speculation, but as a plain suggestion flowing out of that
very ordinary and archaic piece of knowledge that water cannot be piled
up like in a heap, like sand; or that it seeks the lowest level. When,
after 150 days, "the fountains also of the deep and the windows of
heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained" (Gen.
viii.2), what prevented the mass of water, several, possibly very many,
fathoms deep, which covered, say, the present site of Bagdad, from
sweeping seaward in a furious torrent; and, in a very few hours,
leaving, not only the "tops of the mountains," but the whole plain,
save any minor depressions, bare? How could its subsistence, by any
possibility, be an affair of weeks and months?

And if this difficulty is not enough, let any one try to imagine how
a mass of water several perhaps very many, fathoms deep, could be
accumulated on a flat surface of land rising well above the sea,
and separated from it by no sort of barrier. Most people know Lord's
Cricket-ground. Would it not be an absurd contradiction to our common
knowledge of the properties of water to imagine that, if all the
mains of all the waterworks of London were turned on to it, they could
maintain a heap of water twenty feet deep over its level surface? Is it
not obvious that the water, whatever momentary accumulation might take
place at first, would not stop there, but that it would dash, like a
mighty mill-race, southwards down the gentle slope which ends in the
Thames? And is it not further obvious, that whatever depth of water
might be maintained over the cricket-ground so long as all the mains
poured on to it, anything which floated there would be speedily whirled
away by the current, like a cork in a gutter when the rain pours? But
if this is so, then it is no less certain that Noah's deeply laden,
sailless, oarless,