But once things were different.

 

Once things were so that, had somebody taken a walk on the earth, nowhere would a dog have run out of a house and barked at him. For there was not upon all the earth a single dog to run out of a house nor a single house for a dog to run out of.

 

He would not have come upon a tree nor a flower nor a blade of grass. Nor could he have found a drop of water to quench⁴ his thirst with.

 

For there was nobody on the earth—nobody and nothing.

 

Had there been anybody who wanted to take a walk, he simply could not have done so. For the earth was mere⁵ vapour and mist, so that he would have fallen plump through her and plunged⁶ straight into space, where the stars float.

 

And he would not have had much satisfaction from this. For, unless he had been quite round and nice and bright, he would have cut a foolish figure among the stars.

 

Such was the state of things.

 

But the earth quite understood that she could not go on like this for ever. She could not have been intended to be never more than smoke. So she pulled herself together and did her best. But she had to go through a terrible amount and it was a hard time for her, which she never forgot and which she bears the marks of to this day.

 

She had to go through fire and through water too.

 

For thousands of years, she flew through space like a ball of fire and, when at length she had a stone crust about her, the rain poured down upon her nor stopped until she sailed away like an enormous drop of water.

 

Meanwhile, the fire in the earth’s interior broke out each moment through the crust, burst it and split it criss-crosswise and flung the pieces higgledy-piggledy to every side.

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