Now our memory-light is getting very small … and now it’s gone. And yet we know that it goes on much further, to a time long, long ago,before there were any people and when our mountains didn’t look asthey do today. Some of them were bigger, but as the rain poured down it slowly turned them into hills. Others weren’t there at all. They grew up gradually, out of the sea, over millions and millions of year.
But even before the mountains there were animals, quite different from those of today. They were huge and looked rather like dragons.And how do we know that? We sometimes find their bones, deep in the ground.
When I was a schoolboy in Vienna I used to visit the Natural History Museum, where I loved to gaze at the great skeleton of a creature called a Diplodocus. An odd name, Diplodocus. But an even odder creature. It wouldn’t fit into a room at home – or even two, for that matter. It was as tall as a very tall tree, and its tail was half as long as a football pitch. What a tremendous noise it must have made, as itmunched its way through the primeval forest!
But we still haven’t reached the beginning. It all goes back much further – thousands of millions of years. That’s easy enough to say, but stop and think for a moment. Do you know how long one second is? It’s as long as counting: one, two, three. And how about a thousand million seconds? That’s thirty-two years!
Now, try to imagine a thousand million years! At that time there were no large animals, just creatures like snails and worms. And before then there weren’t even any plants. The whole earth was a ‘formless void’. There was nothing. Not a tree,not a bush, not a blade of grass, not a flower, nothing green. Just barren desert rocks and the sea. An empty sea: no fish, no seashells, not even any seaweed. But if you listen to the waves, what do they say? ‘Once
upon a time … ’ Once the earth was perhaps no more than a swirling cloud of gas and dust, like those other, far bigger ones we can see today through our telescopes. For billions and trillions of years, without rocks, without water and without life, that swirling cloud of gas and dust made rings around the sun. And before that? Before that, not even the sun, our good old sun, was there. Only weird and amazing giant stars and smaller heavenly bodies, whirling among the gas clouds in an infinite, infinite universe.
‘Once upon a time’ – but now all this peering down into the past is making me feel dizzy again. Quick! Let’s get back to the sun, to earth,to the beautiful sea, to plants and snails and dinosaurs, to our mountains, and, last of all, to human beings. It’s a bit like coming home, isn’t it? And just so that ‘Once upon a time’ doesn’t keep dragging us back down into that bottomless well, from now on we’ll always shout: ‘Stop! When did that happen?
And if we also ask, ‘And how exactly did that happen?’ we will be asking about history. Not just a story, but our story, the story that we call the history of the world. Shall we begin?
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