And then, I cannot yet tell you how, and till I tell
you you will never know, the delicate flint-needles in my skin
gathered other particles of flint to them, and I and all my
inhabitants became a stone; and the chalk-mud settled round us, I
know not how, and covered us in; and for ages on ages I lay buried
in the nether dark, and felt the glow of the nether fires, and was
cracked and tossed by a hundred earthquakes. Again and again I have
been part of an island, and then again sunk beneath the sea, to be
upheaved again after long centuries, till I saw the light once more,
and dropped from the face of some chalk cliff far away among high
hills which have long since been swept off the face of the earth,
and was tossed by currents till I became a pebble on the beach,
while Reading was a sand-bank in a shallow sea. There I lay and
rolled till I was rounded, for many a century more; till flood after
flood past over me, and a new earth was made; and I was mixed up
with fresh flints from wasting chalk-hills, and with freestones from
the Gloucestershire wolds, and with quartz-boulders from the
mountains of Wales, while over me swept the carcases of drowned
elephants and bisons, and many a monstrous beast; and above me
floated uprooted palms, and tropic fruits and seeds, and the wrecks
of a dying world. And then there came another age--
And it grew wondrous cold;
And ice mast-high came floating by,
As green as emerald;
and as the icebergs melted in the sun, the stones and the silt fell
out of them, and covered me up; and I was in darkness once more,
vexed by many an earthquake, till I became part of this brave
English land.
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