Now what could have done that?
Of course a man could have done it, if he had taken a large round stone
in his hand, and worked the large channellings with that, and then had
taken fine sand and gravel upon the points of his fingers, and worked the
small scratches with that. But this stone came from a place where man
had, perhaps, never stood before,--ay, which, perhaps, had never seen the
light of day before since the world was made; and as I happen to know
that no man made the marks upon that stone, we must set to work and think
again for some tool of Madam How's which may have made them.
And now I think you must give up guessing, and I must tell you the answer
to the riddle. Those marks were made by a hand which is strong and yet
gentle, tough and yet yielding, like the hand of a man; a hand which
handles and uses in a grip stronger than a giant's its own carving tools,
from the great boulder stone as large as this whole room to the finest
grain of sand. And that is ICE.
That piece of stone came from the side of the Rosenlaui glacier in
Switzerland, and it was polished by the glacier ice. The glacier melted
and shrank this last hot summer farther back than it had done for many
years, and left bare sheets of rock, which it had been scraping at for
ages, with all the marks fresh upon them. And that bit was broken off
and brought to me, who never saw a glacier myself, to show me how the
marks which the ice makes in Switzerland are exactly the same as those
which the ice has made in Snowdon and in the Highlands, and many another
place where I have traced them, and written a little, too, about them in
years gone by.
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