Soul of the World (14 page)

In the 1960s an astrophysicist named Thomas Gold proposed that time’s arrow
was
pointed in one direction by the law of thermodynamics; the flow of heat away from stars and into space. As the process cannot be reversed, as light and heat cannot flow backwards into the sun, it transcends the principle of reversibility. He reasoned further that not only is time’s arrow directed by this process, but that time also relies on the expansion of the universe to keep soaking up the heat released by stars. Here’s where things get interesting. If, at some point in the future, the universe should stop expanding (and many cosmologists believe it will), if the expansion of the universe eventually succumbs to the inevitable force of gravity, then radiation will start to converge instead of dissipating. At which point, Gold suggested, time will begin to run backwards and everything that has ever happened will happen again, only in reverse. Martin Amis may have been more prescient than he thought. Glenn Gould, Augustus, Correggio, W. B. Yeats and Nietzsche may, one day, walk this earth again.

Deeper and deeper into Time’s endless tunnel, does the winged soul, like a night-hawk, wend her wild way; and finds eternities before and behind; and her last limit is her everlasting beginning.

—
Herman Melville

The past is always giving us something new. The citizens of eighteenth-century England never suspected that a lost world was buried in the rock beneath their feet, but the nineteenth century brought the discovery of dinosaur bones—skeletons of fantastic creatures that had lain unseen in the limestone for millions of years. The fossils revealed an extraordinary world, very unlike Victorian England, inhabited by giant lizards. A little later in the nineteenth century, archeologists unearthed Egyptian tombs filled with the lavish spoils of an exotic civilization. The most celebrated discovery of this kind was Howard Carter’s unearthing of the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1923. All at once the ancient king’s crypt was a time portal into the world. Pictures of the ornate sarcophagus were relayed across the planet, and global interest spawned a whole economy devoted to the reproduction of Egyptian figurines, jewellery, hairstyles, clothing and architecture. And history continues to yield new cultures as well as extraordinary
animals completely new to science: the velociraptor that went on to star in
Jurassic Park
, the giant pterosaurs of the Cretaceous, with twenty-five-foot wingspans. Over the last two centuries, archeology and paleontology have brought us Herculaneum, mammoths, Troy, sabre-toothed tigers and Babylon.

In a sense I’ve lived my whole life enmeshed in deep time. As a child I used to spend rainy Saturday afternoons leafing through picture books about prehistoric eras. I was enthralled by the lush illustrations of the world of dinosaurs and the tropical Eden they inhabited. In that sense I was like many other young boys who develop a fascination with dinosaurs, though perhaps I took it a little further. My friends and I used to play at being dinosaurs in backyards. I relished the role of
Tyrannosaurus rex
, king of the dinosaurs, most fearsome of the Cretaceous predators. I think I was pretty good at it. I’d curl up my arms on my chest and stick out two hooked fingers to simulate the strangely diminutive front legs of the Tyrannosaurus. Then, assuming a slight crouching position, I’d mimic snapping huge jaws filled with razor-sharp teeth as I roared and chased my friends, whom I’d assigned to be harmless herbivores.

My father, an avid geologist and physiographer, fuelled my interest not only in the Cretaceous period, but in all prehistoric eras. From as far back as I can remember, he was constantly describing the origins of the landforms around our home. His extemporized lectures were especially entertaining when we went on intercity car trips, which became journeys through time as well as space. Under his spell, landscapes melted away as cataclysms erupted out of the hills and valleys. That mound over there was a moraine, a ridge of boulders and gravel deposited by a glacier thirty thousand years ago. That limestone mesa eroded into its shape gradually, over thousands of years. Niagara Falls
was once close to the southern shore of Lake Ontario. Over the millennia it worked its way up the Niagara River to its present location, halfway between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. The limestone cliffs beside the access ramp were deposited millions of years ago at the bottom of a shallow tropical ocean. Through his eyes the landscape became a time machine.

He told me that the limestone boulders in the rock garden at the back of our lawn were made of ocean deposits laid down millions of years before dinosaurs existed. That meant that the fossil shells that studded the rocks were from a time even more primeval and strange than that in which the dinosaurs existed. It was a time called the Devonian period, when there were no land animals at all, and only a very few primitive plants grew at the edges of the oceans.

Looking at those fossil shells I could almost see their colours. I would go into a kind of trance, the rock would disappear and I’d envision the shadows of trilobites and armoured fish flickering across the sandy bottom of a warm tropical lagoon on a sunny afternoon untold years ago. (My reveries of primeval reefs eventually grew into a love of snorkelling in modern reefs. After all, coral reefs haven’t changed that much over four hundred million years, although, of course, the design of the fish has been updated.)

I became completely fascinated with the Devonian period and borrowed book after book from our little local library, often reborrowing the same book so that I could linger over the illustrations of the unlikely-looking creatures that teemed in those ancient tropical oceans. Gardens of crinoids that looked like tulips made out of beads waved in the currents between the coral reefs, their feathery calcium petals filtering plankton out of the water. Swimming around the coral and crinoids were trilobites. I loved their compact, sculptural bodies and the fact that they were divided into three segments, like insects. I imagined
that they were as colourful as reef fish are today. The first true fishes were also alive in the Devonian, although most of them were protected by plated armour. For good reason.

Some of the things that have emerged from prehistory are not as attractive as others. Velociraptors are fearsome, as are the tryannosaurs. But not all dangerous fauna were land-based. When I was a child leafing through illustrated books on prehistoric water creatures, I used to avoid the pages with illustrations of eurypterids, otherwise known as sea scorpions. It was an instinctive reaction of mine. Eurypterids were nasty customers indeed. They looked like a cross between a scorpion and a lobster, with two large paddle arms at the front end and a long, poisonous stinger at the rear. Some specimens were nine feet long, which makes them the biggest arthropods ever. Not only were they the top predator of their era, they were also real survivors. Their original colour, deep amber brown, is as bright today (when chipped out of rock by fossil hunters) as it was in the Devonian period. In certain cases, their tough, leathery shells resisted the mineralizing effects of fossilization, so that some specimens, though locked in limestone for four hundred million years, are still flexible today. Talk about a time capsule.

As the Devonian period waned into the Carboniferous period, several species of eurypterids evolved to inhabit fresh water while others probably became land-dwelling. It could be that scorpions are their diminutive descendants. And if giant eurypterids had not died out, they might be as ubiquitous now as their Carboniferous brethren, the cockroaches. Land-dwelling eurypterids would make living in the tropics impossible. To me, even our two-hundred-million-year distance seems uncomfortably close.

Because fossils were the most direct way of experiencing the Devonian period, I spent a lot of time at the the Royal Ontario
Museum in Toronto, where my father was an associate archeologist. While he met with fellow archeologists he would turn me loose, and I’d head straight for my devotional temple—the invertebrate paleontology gallery. I passed many afternoons there, poring over glass display cases that contained row after row of impossibly perfect fossils: slate slabs scattered with dozens of glistening black trilobites that looked as if they might swim away at any moment; groves of crinoids that seemed to have turned to stone as they undulated in the warm sea. Many of the fossils appeared to have been carved out of stone by meticulous sculptors. There were also cases full of ornate shells, sometimes completely freed from the rock, as marvellous as any that adorn the remote beaches of today’s Pacific Ocean.

My supreme thrill came when my family went on picnic excursions to Rock Glen, a small limestone gorge in the countryside near my hometown in southwestern Ontario. This was pure time travel. We would eat our sandwiches at the top of the glen overlooking the waterfall, then explore the forested gorge. The shale and limestone there brimmed with fossils, and because the rock was so soft, the fossils tumbled out whole and rolled down the sides of the gorge, where they collected in drifts by the side of the river. It was fossil heaven, where the border between the present and prehistory blurred. On the upper slopes I could coax soft layers of slate apart with my hands, like leaves in the book of time. And in the shallow water of the stream at the bottom of the gorge, the submerged fossils of trilobites looked as though they might be grazing on the algae there.

It sometimes seemed to me that I was trapped in a relatively uninteresting epoch that was not natural to my inclinations, that I was not of my time. I was a citizen, and still am, of deep time. Periods spanning millions of years strike me as natural, though I must admit, when
billions
are mentioned, things get a little abstract, even for me. I think that the origin of my familiarity with deep time came from a revelation I had one rainy, cold Sunday afternoon in late November, when I was eleven.

I was leafing through a copy of
The World We Live In
, a big, wonderfully illustrated hardcover book about the history of life on earth. The page that caught my eye that afternoon, even though I’d looked at it many times before, was an illustration of the glacial age. It showed a four-thousand-foot wall of ice at the advancing edge of a continental glacier. You could see the lines and crevices along the top of the glacier, which stretched back in the distance to a grey polar darkness. There was an apocalyptic, icy grandeur to the scene.

As I stared dreamily at the illustration of the lake at the base of the glacier—at the small icebergs floating in the water and the evergreen forest growing bravely beside the glacier itself—a shock of pure, deep time went through me. I knew that the location of that picture could easily have been right where our house now stood, these hundreds of millennia later. It was as if something within me had done the math. I could actually feel what existing for ten thousand years would be like, and I was filled with both dread and awe. It wasn’t just a sense of mortality, of how short life is in comparison to these millennial spans; it was the direct sensation within my body of every echoing century. I stood on that chilly shore.

That experience changed me, and though I have never really, physically grasped such a period of time since, the vision gave me a kind of fluency with time, one that allows me to directly sense the hoary patina of history that gilds all ancient artifacts. I still marvel at fossils, and I feel every bit as much excitement going into a museum today as I did as a child. Also, limestone continues to hold dreams and nostalgia for me, vistas of lost epochs and spectacular new fossils. Limestone is sheer
potential. Who knows what wonders are hidden within it, what secrets it might yield of time past?

L
IMESTONE AND
C
LAY

Limestone isn’t simply a chronological record of prehistory, it is compressed time. The horizontal layers you see in road cuts through limestone beside highways were laid down millions of years ago as sediment at the bottom of oceans. I once calculated how much time was contained in a vertical inch of limestone, at least as it is represented by the dolomite cliff that Niagara Falls pours over. I divided the height of the cliff, 167 feet, by the number of years it represented, about thirty million, and came up with 15,000 years an inch. If you consider that the first citystates arose in Mesopotamia only 10,500 years ago, then the staggering age of this rock starts to become apparent. The layers of sedimentary stone that form the walls of the Grand Canyon in Colorado are even more impressive; they contain a continuous vertical record of 330 million years of life on earth. When you stand on the lip of the Grand Canyon, you are looking into an abyss of time as well as space.

On top of holding the often perfectly cast remains of extinct creatures, of shells and dinosaurs, limestone also preserves single days—indeed, single moments. The trackway of a small, birdlike dinosaur discovered recently in Alberta is a record of a few seconds in time millions of years ago, when the dinosaur foraged at the muddy edge of a river.

There are other fossil records of this same kind of ephemeral, transitory moment. A few decades ago, in an area of northern Tanzania called Laetoli, the trackways of two, possibly three, hominids were discovered preserved in stone. The tracks were so clear that they looked as if they had just been made the day before; in fact, they have since been
calculated to be over 3.5 million years old. The actions of this small group of pre-humans, walking through the freshly fallen ash near an active volcano after a light rainfall, have been reconstructed, and so we know that at one point the footprints stop, indicating that the group paused to look around them. Did the nearby volcano erupt briefly? Did a carnivore roar? And where were they going? If there were two of them, it appears it was a male and a female. But if there were three—and most anthropologists believe there were—why did the second, smaller male not only walk behind the first two, but also deliberately step in the tracks of the first male?

Trackways are not the only record of transitory events. One of my favourite kinds of preserved moments in time are fossil ripple marks. More than representing a particular few minutes in time or revealing the behaviour of a creature, they represent a day, perhaps a single afternoon, in a shallow coral reef lagoon. Ripple patterns in underwater sand change gradually, from one day to the next, as the waves above transform them. In the Caribbean I’ve snorkelled over acres of flat white lagoon sand, scanning the smoothly corrugated contours for brittle stars and sand divers. I’ve always found this expanse of sinuous texture, like a giant’s fingerprint, to be meditative and idyllic. White underwater sand, lit turquoise by sea and sunlight, seems to me to be one of the essences of a tropical afternoon. But to come upon an identically contoured series of ripple marks, preserved in sandstone more than three hundred million years old, is to be sent back in time to an eerily similar lagoon lit by a similar sun. The earth was spinning more quickly then, so the primeval afternoon would end sooner than our afternoon does now, but the sand flats would be identical—until you reached the reef, that is. Then there would be some surprises in store: schools of squids housed in coiled shells, foraging trilobites and fish whose heads were covered with bony plates.