Creole Sketches/The Alligators
THE ALLIGATORS[1]
None discover aught of beauty in them; yet they were once worshiped as gods.
They were not of this world, in truth, but of another — the Antediluvian world of monsters and dragons and vast swamps broader than continents — where there were frogs larger than oxen, and alligators longer than the serpent slain by the army of Regulus.
The Ichthyosaurus, the Pterodactyl, the Megatherium, the Plesiosaurus — have passed away with the Antediluvian world.
This strange being, with its dull cuirass marked like the trunks of the primeval tree-ferns, still endures — although new strata have been formed since the birth of his species — although the monstrous vegetation of the swamps in which his ancestors crawled has been transformed to beds of coal!
Alligator, crocodile, or cayman — it matters little — they alike belong to the age before which history began.
And looking upon them, must not one dream of the sacred Ganges and the most ancient Nile — of South American rivers that flow by dead palaces buried in the vegetation of virgin forests — of dead civilizations — of Karnac and Thebes and Crocodilopolis — of catacombs and broken-limbed colossi — of empires and of races that have been swallowed up by Time? The world has changed, but the Giant Lizard changes not.
- ↑ Item, September 13, 1880.