Of course they do, only they do not think in words, as we do.
But how can they think without words?
That is very difficult for you and me to imagine, because we always think in words. They must think in pictures, I suppose, by remembering things which have happened to them. You and I do that in our dreams. I suspect that savages, who have very few words to express their thoughts with, think in pictures, like their own dogs. But that is a long story. We must see about getting on board now, and under way.
* * *
Well, and what have you been doing?
Oh, I looked all over the yacht, at the ropes and curious things; and then I looked at the mountains, till I was tired; and then I heard you and some gentleman talking about the land sinking, and I listened. There was no harm in that?
None at all. But what did you hear him say?
That the land must be sinking here, because there were peat-bogs everywhere below high-water mark. Is that true?
Quite true; and that peat would never have been formed where the salt water could get at it, as it does now every tide.
But what was it he said about that cliff over there?
He said that cliff on our right, a hundred feet high, was plainly once joined on to that low island on our left.
What, that long bank of stones, with a house on it?
That is no house. That is a square lump of mud, the last remaining bit of earth which was once the moraine of a glacier.
Every year it crumbles into the sea more and more; and in a few years it will be all gone, and nothing left but the great round boulder-stones which the ice brought down from the glaciers behind us.
But how does he know that it was once joined to the cliff?
Because that cliff, and the down behind it, where the cows are fed, is made up, like the island, of nothing but loose earth and stones; and that is why it is bright and green beside the gray rocks and brown heather of the moors at its foot. He knows that it must be an old glacier moraine; and he has reason to think that moraine once stretched right across the bay to the low island, and perhaps on to the other shore, and was eaten out by the sea as the land sank down.