So now for the water in the chalk. You can see now why the chalk- downs at Winchester are always green, even in the hottest summer: because Madam How has put under them her great chalk sponge. The winter rains soak into it; and the summer heat draws that rain out of it again as invisible steam, coming up from below, to keep the roots of the turf cool and moist under the blazing sun.
You love that short turf well. You love to run and race over the Downs with your butterfly-net and hunt "chalk-hill blues," and "marbled whites," and "spotted burnets," till you are hot and tired; and then to sit down and look at the quiet little old city below, with the long cathedral roof, and the tower of St. Cross, and the gray old walls and buildings shrouded by noble trees, all embosomed among the soft rounded lines of the chalk-hills; and then you begin to feel very thirsty, and cry, "Oh, if there were but springs and brooks in the Downs, as there are at home!" But all the hollows are as dry as the hill tops. There is not a brook, or the mark of a watercourse, in one of them. You are like the Ancient Mariner in the poem, with "Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink."
To get that you must go down and down, hundreds of feet, to the green meadows through which silver Itchen glides toward the sea.
There you stand upon the bridge, and watch the trout in water so crystal-clear that you see every weed and pebble as if you looked through air. If ever there was pure water, you think, that is pure. Is it so? Drink some. Wash your hands in it and try--You feel that the water is rough, hard (as they call it), quite different from the water at home, which feels as soft as velvet.
What makes it so hard?
Because it is full of invisible chalk. In every gallon of that water there are, perhaps, fifteen grains of solid chalk, which was once inside the heart of the hills above. Day and night, year after year, the chalk goes down to the sea; and if there were such creatures as water-fairies--if it were true, as the old Greeks and Romans thought, that rivers were living things, with a Nymph who dwelt in each of them, and was its goddess or its queen--then, if your ears were opened to hear her, the Nymph of Itchen might say to you -
So child, you think that I do nothing but, as your sister says when she sings Mr. Tennyson's beautiful song, "I chatter over stony ways, In little sharps and trebles, I bubble into eddying bays, I babble on the pebbles."
Yes. I do that: and I love, as the Nymphs loved of old, men who have eyes to see my beauty, and ears to discern my song, and to fit their own song to it, and tell how "'I wind about, and in and out, With here a blossom sailing, And here and there a lusty trout, And here and there a grayling, "'And here and there a foamy flake Upon me, as I travel With many a silvery waterbreak Above the golden gravel, "'And draw them all along, and flow To join the brimming river, For men may come and men may go, But I go on for ever.'"
Yes. That is all true: but if that were all, I should not be let to flow on for ever, in a world where Lady Why rules, and Madam How obeys. I only exist (like everything else, from the sun in heaven to the gnat which dances in his beam) on condition of working, whether we wish it or not, whether we know it or not. I am not an idle stream, only fit to chatter to those who bathe or fish in my waters, or even to give poets beautiful fancies about me. You little guess the work I do. For I am one of the daughters of Madam How, and, like her, work night and day, we know not why, though Lady Why must know. So day by day, and night by night, while you are sleeping (for I never sleep), I carry, delicate and soft as I am, a burden which giants could not bear: and yet I am never tired. Every drop of rain which the south-west wind brings from the West Indian seas gives me fresh life and strength to bear my burden; and it has need to do so; for every drop of rain lays a fresh burden on me. Every root and weed which grows in every field; every dead leaf which falls in the highwoods of many a parish, from the Grange and Woodmancote round to Farleigh and Preston, and so to Brighton and the Alresford downs;-
-ay, every atom of manure which the farmers put on the land--foul enough then, but pure enough before it touches me--each of these, giving off a tiny atom of what men call carbonic acid, melts a tiny grain of chalk, and helps to send it down through the solid hill by one of the million pores and veins which at once feed and burden my springs. Ages on ages I have worked on thus, carrying the chalk into the sea. And ages on ages, it may be, I shall work on yet; till I have done my work at last, and levelled the high downs into a flat sea-shore, with beds of flint gravel rattling in the shallow waves.
She might tell you that; and when she had told you, you would surely think of the clumsy chalk-cart rumbling down the hill, and then of the graceful stream, bearing silently its invisible load of chalk; and see how much more delicate and beautiful, as well as vast and wonderful, Madam How's work is than that of man.
But if you asked the nymph why she worked on for ever, she could not tell you. For like the Nymphs of old, and the Hamadryads who lived, in trees, and Undine, and the little Sea-maiden, she would have no soul; no reason; no power to say why.
It is for you, who are a reasonable being, to guess why: or at least listen to me if I guess for you, and say, perhaps--I can only say perhaps--that chalk may be going to make layers of rich marl in the sea between England and France; and those marl-beds may be upheaved and grow into dry land, and be ploughed, and sowed, and reaped by a wiser race of men, in a better-ordered world than this: or the chalk may have even a nobler destiny before it. That may happen to it, which has happened already to many a grain of lime. It may be carried thousands of miles away to help in building up a coral reef (what that is I must tell you afterwards). That coral reef may harden into limestone beds.