There was a great blasted tree, not very high but with enormous outspreading limbs extending dead and bare, which stood not far from the utmost limit of the waters, and which had become strangely peopled on the day of the earthquake and first tidal wave, as I had noticed dimly on my visits to the shore. Tired in their flight or seeking the tree but as a place of refuge, creatures of earth and air had peopled it and even sought shelter at its base, unmoving and stupefied throughout the days and nights of ceaseless rain and darkness. There stood together a stag and a great brown bear each mindless of the other. Upon the huge outspreading lower limbs crouched half a dozen more of the leopard cats of the region and as many of the sort of smaller bears which climb, and, above them scores of the lesser climbing things, while above them still perched wearied birds of many kinds, from those of the woods and fields to vultures and croaking ravens. Bats from the flooded caves hung dangling by hundreds from the smaller branches. It was a black dream of a tree, a tree of life in death. And now, it suddenly awoke to life! The stag raised its head snortingly and went leaping up the mountain, and the bear followed him shufflingly, followed in turn by all the other animals. The birds took flight; and I watched this departure gladly, for it seemed a proof that our sufferings were really ended. The birds and beasts know many things unknown to man. But whence had come this awful catastrophe which had brought such tremendous death and changed a part of the face of the earth? Much I thought upon it. Had the fearful earthquake, such as never was before, but rent apart the mountain chain between the lower inland sea and the great ocean to the westward and so let in the mighty rush of water, raising the level of the sea to that of the ocean itself, the ocean no man had ever passed and the awful limit of which no man could tell? This seemed to me the reason of all that had come, but who could tell assuredly? The water kept at an even level now. It had become as it would stay. The land of the Goatskins lay deep beneath its waters, and life in this part of the world must subsist only upon the higher plains to the south and east, the curtailed land of future Palestine. The gray of the sky became lighter, the vast curtain parted into floating clouds, and the radiance of the sun burst upon the world again. But upon what a scene that radiance fell!