and rudderless craft, if by good fortune it escaped
capsizing in whirlpools, or having its bottom knocked into holes by
snags (like those which prove fatal even to well-built steamers on the
Mississippi in our day), would have speedily found itself a good way
down the Persian Gulf, and not long after in the Indian Ocean, somewhere
between Arabia and Hindostan. Even if, eventually, the ark might have
gone ashore, with other jetsam and flotsam, on the coasts of Arabia, or
of Hindostan, or of the Maldives, or of Madagascar, its return to the
"mountains of Ararat" would have been a miracle more stupendous than all
the rest.

Thus, the last state of the would-be reconcilers of the story of the
Deluge with fact is worse than the first. All that they have done is
to transfer the contradictions to established truth from the region
of science proper to that of common information and common sense. For,
really, the assertion that the surface of a body of deep water, to which
no addition was made, and which there was nothing to stop from running
into the sea, sank at the rate of only a few inches or even feet a day,
simply outrages the most ordinary and familiar teachings of every man's
daily experience. A child may see the folly of it.

In addition, I may remark that the necessary assumption of the "partial
Deluge" hypothesis (if it is confined to Mesopotamia) that the Hebrew
writer must have meant low hills when he said "high mountains," is quite
untenable. On the eastern side of the Mesopotamian plain, the snowy
peaks of the frontier ranges of Persia are visible from Bagdad, [11]
and even the most ignorant herdsmen in the neighbourhood of "Ur of the
Chaldees," near its western limit, could hardly have been unacquainted
with the comparatively elevated plateau of the Syrian desert which lay
close at hand. But, surely, we must suppose the Biblical writer to be
acquainted with the highlands of Palestine and with the masses of the
Sinaitic peninsula, which soar more than 8000 feet above the sea, if he
knew of no higher elevations; and, if so, he could not well have meant
to refer to mere hillocks when he said that "all the high mountains
which were under the whole heaven were covered" (Genesis vii. 19). Even
the hill-country of Galilee reaches an elevation of 4000 feet; and a
flood which covered it could by no possibility have been other than
universal in its superficial extent. Water really cannot be got to stand
at, say, 4000 fee