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And this land-making action is ceaseless and continuous. About Venice, Chioggia, Maestra, Comacchio, the delta of the Po is still spreading seaward. In the course of ages–if nothing unforeseen occurs meanwhile to prevent it–the Alpine mud will have filled in the entire Adriatic; and the Ionian Isles will spring like isolated mountain ridges from the Adriatic plain, as the Euganean hills–those ‘mountains Euganean’ where Shelley ‘stood listening to the paean with which the legioned rocks did hail the sun’s uprise majestical’–spring in our own time from the dead level of Lombardy. Once they in turn were the Euganean islands, and even now to the trained eye of the historical observer they stand up island-like from the vast green plain that spreads flat around them.

Perhaps it seems to you a rather large order to be asked to believe that Lombardy and Venetia are nothing more than an outspread sheet of deep Alpine mud. Well, there is nothing so good for incredulity, don’t you know, as capping the climax. If a man will not swallow an inch of fact, the best remedy is to make him gulp down an ell of it. And, indeed, the Lombard plain is but an insignificant mud flat compared with the vast alluvial plains of Asiatic and American rivers. The alluvium of the Euphrates, of the Mississippi, of the Hoang Ho, of the Amazons would take in many Lombardies and half-a-dozen Venetias without noticing the addition. But I will insist upon only one example–the rivers of India, which have formed the gigantic deep mud flat of the Ganges and the Jumna, one of the very biggest on earth, and that because the Himalayas are the highest and newest mountain chain exposed to denudation. For, as we saw foreshadowed in the case of the Alps and Apennines, the bigger the mountains on which we can draw the greater the resulting mass of alluvium. The Rocky Mountains give rise to the Missouri (which is the real Mississippi); the Andes give rise to Amazons and the La Plata; the Himalayas give rise to the Ganges and the Indus. Great mountain, great river, great resulting mud sheet.

At a very remote period, so long ago that we cannot reduce it to any common measure with our modern chronology, the southern table-land of India–the Deccan, as we call it–formed a great island like Australia, separated from the continent of Asia by a broad arm of the sea which occupied what is now the great plain of Bengal, the North-West, and the Punjaub. This ancient sea washed the foot of the Himalayas, and spread south thence for 600 miles to the base of the Vindhyas. But the Himalayas are high and clad with gigantic glaciers. Much ice grinds much mud on those snow-capped summits. The rivers that flowed from the Roof of the World carried down vast sheets of alluvium, which formed fans at their mouths, like the cones still deposited on a far smaller scale in the Lake of Geneva by little lateral torrents. Gradually the silt thus brought down accumulated on either side, till the rivers ran together into two great systems–one westward–the Indus, with its four great tributaries, Jhelum, Chenab, Ravee, Sutlej; one eastward, the Ganges, reinforced lower down by the sister streams of the Jumna and the Brahmapootra. The colossal accumulation of silt thus produced filled up at last all the great arm of the sea between the two mountain chains, and joined the Deccan by slow degrees to the continent of Asia. It is still engaged in filling up the Bay of Bengal on one side by the detritus of the Ganges, and the Arabian Sea on the other by the sand-banks of the Indus.

In the same way, no doubt, the silt of the Thames, the Humber, the Rhine, and the Meuse tend slowly (bar accidents) to fill up the North Sea, and anticipate Sir Edward Watkin by throwing a land bridge across the English Channel. If ever that should happen, then history will have repeated itself, for it is just so that the Deccan was joined to the mainland of Asia.