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vanished away. A good deal of them, I proposed, would have succumbed during the great flood.
    One would have thought this might be an end to the matter, but no, my suggestions seemed only to feed the flames. Within weeks a countering piece appeared, not by my original adversary but by another of this many-headed hydra. What, my new critic demanded, of the first plants and animals? Genesis states that these were placed upon the earth within two days of the earth having been formed. Surely, he insisted, even divine refrigeration could not cool a world of molten rocks so quickly.
    Thus was the Garden of Eden brought into the fray.
    My staunchest ally in this desperate battle was the Good Book itself. Although the Scriptures possess the answer to every question that may be asked, they do not always surrender these easily. Sometimes the faithof the reader is tested with an ingenious puzzle, for which there are provided clever clues, and thus it was here. The Bible tells us that man and the animals at first dwelled only in one place—in all likelihood not even an especially large place—being the Garden of Eden. Here lay our answer. I surmised that Eden had lain upon a unique form of rock, one that was wholly impervious to heat, and which floated upon the rest like a great raft, probably surrounded by clouds of steamy vapour. Genesis does not tell us how long it was that Adam and Eve lived contentedly in the Garden before the serpent went about his wicked work, but men seemed to have lived to a great age then and it was surely a good number of years. By the time they were finally banished, the rest of the earth would have had ample time to be cooled by refrigeration, and plants and animals would have spread far and wide across its surface. This was the thesis of my second pamphlet:
The Geology of Eden considered
.
    It seems, however, there is no silencing critics. If this is true, they cried, in letters to periodicals, and as many as two articles, then where is this special form of rock? Why has it not been found?
    For some time I struggled with this problem, and I will admit I struggled in vain. Studies and reading brought no relief, likewise the letters I wrote to those few intrepid fellows who had travelled in remoter regions of Arabia, where I still supposed Eden must lie. Those were difficult weeks, and I confess I came close to abandoning the matter altogether, deciding, with the greatest reluctance, that there was nothing to be done but simply to wait for future discoveries to prove my case.
    Then, one day, I received a most unexpected piece of correspondence. The sender, who had been following my writings with interest, explained that he had previously lived for some years as a sheep farmer upon the remote island of Van Diemen’s Land, that has lately been renamed Tasmania, and lies just southwards of Australia. His farm had lain on high ground on the very edge of the settled area and he related how, on clear days, he could glimpse the distant mountains of the wilderness beyond. Though he had travelled extensively in other parts of the globe he had never seen anything remotely similar to these. The peaks, he said, were like ruined fortresses, almost as if they were all thatremained of some wondrous city, built upon a scale greater than could be aspired to by mere man, that had lain forgotten for thousands of years. As if this were not already curious enough, he insisted that exploration of the colony had been largely confined to the coast and that, with the exception of aboriginal black men, not a soul had yet explored this distant wasteland.
    All at once my mind was set racing. Genesis, in that famous passage, which had, I realized, often left me slightly puzzled, states that four rivers flowed out from Eden. One is the Pison, which is unknown, a second is the Gihon, also unknown, which is said to flow to Ethiopia. A third is named the Hiddekel,
which goeth towards the east of Assyria
, and lastly there is the Euphrates.