1There was a young Englishman named Charles Darwin who was meant to be a country parson. His father was a rich doctor, and a large man in every sense, and he had lost patience with his son. The boy had tried to study medicine and had run out of the room where a child was being cut without anything to dull the pain. He cared for nothing, his father told him, but shooting and dogs and catching rats. So he was to be a clergyman, since a clergyman may collect beetles and do no harm.
2Then a letter came. A small ship of the king's navy was going out to chart the coasts of South America and then go on around the world. Her captain wanted a gentleman on board to study the rocks and the living things, and to be company for him at table. There was no pay. Would Charles go?
3His father said no. It was a wild scheme and would unfit him for the church. But he added: find me one man of sense who thinks you should go, and I will change my mind. Charles's uncle was a man of sense, and he thought so. The doctor kept his word.
4The ship was the Beagle. She was ninety feet long, and seventy-four people lived in her. Charles slept in a hammock slung over the chart table. He was twenty-two. The voyage was to last two years. It lasted nearly five.
5He was sick the whole of it. Not for a week, as sailors are, but every time the ship met a sea, for five years. He lay in the hammock eating raisins, which were all he could keep down, and he read. The captain, whose name was FitzRoy, had given him a new book by the lawyer Lyell. It said that the earth was made by slow small causes working over ages without number. Charles read it between bouts of sickness. He thought it very likely true. He did not yet know that he would see it proved with his own eyes, in a single day.
6Wherever the ship touched land, he was a different man. He rode with the cattlemen of the great plains and slept on the ground with his saddle for a pillow. He dug in a sea-bank at a place called Punta Alta and pulled out bones as thick as tree trunks. They were the bones of giant beasts, long dead. And here was a curious thing: they were made on the same plan as the small sloths and armoured creatures that lived on that very plain now, only many times larger. Why should the dead giants of a country look like its living dwarfs? He wrote the question down. He had no answer.
7In the fourth year the Beagle was working up the coast of Chile. One morning Charles went ashore near the town of Valdivia and lay down in a wood to rest.
8The ground began to move.
9It did not shake as a cart shakes. It rolled, like the deck of the ship he had come ashore to escape. He stood up, and it made him giddy. The solid earth, the one thing a man trusts without thinking, was sliding under him like a skin over water. It lasted two minutes. He said later that in that time a lifetime of belief in firm ground was overturned.
10In the wood it did little harm. But some days after, the ship came to the city of Concepción, and there he saw what it had done.
11There was no city. He rode in through streets that were long heaps of brick and timber. Not one house stood whole. The great church was a mound, with part of one wall leaning over it. The people were living in the fields under blankets hung on sticks. And after the shaking, the sea had drawn back out of the bay and then come in again as a wall of water, and carried houses and cattle and a ship's anchor far inland. He found a schooner lying among the ruins, two hundred paces from the beach.
12He walked among people who had lost everything they had built in their lives. He was ashamed afterward that some part of him had been thrilled, for he had seen what few students of the earth ever see.
13For it was not only the city that had moved. Along the shore he found beds of mussels, still fixed to their rocks, rotting in the sun. They were above the reach of the highest tide. Ten days before, they had been under the sea. The captain measured it on an island down the coast: the land had risen by the height of a tall man and more.
14Charles stood on that stinking shore and saw it whole. The lawyer was right. Mountains are not thrown up in one great day. They are lifted the height of a man at a time, with a thousand years of quiet between. But give that a thousand thousand years, and it will raise a sea-floor to the snow line.
15A month later he went to see whether it had.
16He crossed the great mountains, the Andes, from the coast of Chile to the plains on the far side and back again. He had with him a guide named Mariano Gonzales, and a muleteer, and ten mules, and a mare with a bell around her neck. The mules would follow the bell of that mare through storm and dark, and without her they would have scattered over half a continent.
17The road went up through valleys of red and purple stone into a country with no trees, then no bushes, then nothing but rock and wind. At the top of the pass the air was so thin that the mules stopped every fifty steps to breathe.
18And there, on the ridge, nearly as high as the highest mountain in Europe, he broke open the grey rock with his hammer, and it was full of sea-shells. They were turned to stone, but there was no mistaking them. He was standing on the floor of a sea, with the clouds below him. He forgot that he could not breathe. He filled his pockets and laughed aloud, and the muleteer looked at him with pity.
19That night they camped under the pass. It was bitterly cold. They made a fire of the roots of a small mountain plant, which was all that would burn, and they put potatoes in a pot to boil. The potatoes boiled for hours and stayed as hard as when they went in. For at that height water boils before it is truly hot. The two men had never been so high with a pot before. They decided the pot was cursed and would not cook potatoes. Charles began to explain, and then stopped, and ate his hard potato with them.
20They were sitting so, close to the small fire, when a traveller came down the path from the pass.
21It was a woman of middle years, wrapped in a blanket of dark wool, leading one thin mule. She might have been a trader's widow going over to sell on the far side. She did not say. She stood at the edge of the light until Mariano bade her come in, as is the custom in those mountains, where a fire refused can be a death.
22She sat. They gave her potatoes from the cursed pot, and she chewed them without complaint. From her saddle-bag she took strips of dried beef and a twist of salt, and shared them round. For a while no one spoke. The stars up there do not twinkle. They stand in the black like nails.
23She looked at the heavy bags by Charles's saddle. He told her, in his poor Spanish, that they were stones. He was carrying stones across the mountains. She seemed to think this no stranger than what most men carry.
24Then she asked him one thing. She asked it in the Spanish of the mountains, plainly, as one asks the way.
25"What have you left open?"
26He thought he had mistaken the words. He thought she meant a gate, or the mouth of a bag. He looked about him, and she watched him look. Then he saw that she did not mean a bag.
27He could not answer. He was a young man who had finished nothing. He had left medicine. He had left the parsonage standing empty in his future, like a house with the key still in the door. He had bags of stones and bones and skins and ten notebooks of questions, and not one answer. Everything he had was open. He did not know if that was a thing to be ashamed of or the only wealth he owned.
28"I do not know yet," he said at last. "I have not shut anything. I have only been looking."
29She nodded as if that would do for now, and pulled her blanket over her head. In the grey before dawn, when the cold woke him, she and the thin mule were gone. The mare's bell was sounding somewhere below, and Mariano was blowing on the ashes. Charles did not write her in his journal. There was nothing in it that he could have called an observation.
30They went on. On the far side of the range, at a place called Uspallata, he found something that told him more than the shells had.
31On a bare hillside, seven thousand feet above the sea, stood the stumps of trees. There were half a hundred of them. They were stone, white and hard, but each stood upright where it had grown, and he could see the rings in the wood.
32He sat down among them and read their story, the way Mary Anning read her cliff. These trees had grown in soil, beside a sea, for there were sea-sands around their roots. Then the land had sunk, and the forest had gone under the water, standing. Sand and mud had buried it, thousands of feet deep, and the wood had turned to stone in the dark. Then the land had risen again, higher than before, and wind and rain had stripped away the cover, grain by grain, until the dead forest stood once more in the sun. And he had come by on a mule and seen it.
33How long does that take? He tried to think of the number and could not. He only knew that all the kings and all the wars of history would not fill the first hour of it.
34The earth was old, then, and it moved. The stage itself was never still. And if the stage changed, sea to mountain, forest to desert, what became of the players? Did each kind of creature stay as it was made, while the ground was pulled from under it? He wrote that question down too.
35In the last year of the voyage the Beagle came to a cluster of islands on the line of the equator, six hundred miles out in the great ocean. They were the Galápagos. He did not think them beautiful. They were heaps of black cinder with craters on them, and they put him in mind of the iron furnaces of the English midlands. The sun beat on the black rock until it burned the feet through boots.
36But the creatures there had never learned to fear people. He could push a hawk off a branch with the muzzle of his gun. And there were tortoises so large that it took six men to lift one.
37The man who governed the islands told him a thing in passing, at dinner. He said he could tell at a glance which island any tortoise came from, by the shape of its shell. Charles heard it and did not hear it. The crew had been eating tortoises for weeks and throwing the shells overboard, and he let them.
38He was more careful with some small grey birds, mocking-thrushes, that hopped about the camp. He shot a few on each island and wrote on each label which island it came from. Later, at sea, he laid them side by side on the chart table. The birds from one island were all alike. The birds from the next island were all alike too, but they were not like the first. The islands lay within sight of each other, on the same sea, under the same sun, made of the same black rock.
39There were small dull finches there also. He did not think them worth the trouble, and he put the finches of all the islands into one bag. He was to be sorry for that for the rest of his life.
40He came home after five years with a brown face and a ruined stomach. Nothing more was said about the parsonage.
41He gave his birds to a man in London who knew birds better than anyone alive. The bird man studied them for some weeks. Then he told Charles what he had. The mocking-thrushes were three separate kinds, one to an island. And the dull little birds in the bag, which Charles had taken for wrens and blackbirds and finches all mixed, were finches, every one: a dozen kinds and more, found nowhere else on earth, each with its own shape of beak. One had a beak for cracking hard seeds, and one a beak for catching flies, and one a beak like a pair of fine pincers.
42Charles walked home through the London streets and did not see them. He was thinking about a few lost birds, blown out over six hundred miles of sea, long ago, to a group of new black islands where no small bird lived. And then about their children's children, on this island and that one, each island a little different, for longer than he could count.
43That summer he bought a small notebook with a brown cover, and he told no one what it was for. On one page he wrote two words: "I think." Under them he drew a line that went up, and split, and split again, and each branch split in its turn, until the page looked like a bare tree in winter.
44He looked at it for a long time. Then he shut the notebook and put it in a drawer. He was afraid of what he had drawn. He was to go on being afraid of it for twenty years.