AND THESE ARE THE PEOPLE WHO LIVE IN THE WORLD WE LIVE IN
IT sounds incredible, but nevertheless it is true. If everybody in this world of ours were six feet tall and a foot and a half wide and a foot thick (and that is making people a little bigger than they usually are), then the whole of the human race (and according to the latest available statistics, there are now nearly 2,000,000,000 descendants of the original Homo sapiens and his wife) could be packed into a box measuring half a mile in each direction. That, as I just said, sounds incredible, but if you don’t believe me figure it out for yourself and you will find it to be correct.
If we transported that box to the Grand Canyon of Arizona and balanced it neatly on the low stone wall that keeps people from breaking their necks when stunned by the incredible beauty of that silent witness of the forces of Eternity and then called little Noodle, the dachshund and told him (the tiny beast is very intelligent and loves to oblige) to give the unwieldy contraption a slight push with his soft brown nose, there would be a moment of crunching and ripping as the wooden planks loosened stones and shrubs and trees on their downward path and then a low and even softer bumpity-bumpity-bump and a sudden splash when the outer edges struck the banks of the Colorado River.
Then silence and oblivion.
The human sardines in their mortuary chest would soon be forgotten.
The Canyon would go on battling wind and air and sun and rain as it has done since it was created.
The world would continue to run its even course through the uncharted heavens.
The astronomers on distant and nearby planets would have noticed nothing out of the ordinary.
A century from now, a little mound, densely covered with vegetable matter, would perhaps indicate where humanity lay buried.
And that would be all.
I can well imagine that some of my readers will not quite like this story and will feel rather uncomfortable when they see their own proud race reduced to such proportions of sublime insignificance.
There is however a different angle to the problem-an angle which makes the very smallness of our numbers and the helplessness of our puny little bodies a matter of profound and sincere pride.
Here we are, a mere handful of weak and defenceless mammals. Ever since the dawn of the first day we have been surrounded on all sides by hordes and swarms of creatures infinitely better prepared for the struggle for existence. Some of them were a hundred feet long and weighed as much as a small locomotive, while others had teeth as sharp as the blade of a circular saw. Many varieties went about their daily affairs clad in the armour of a medieval knight. Others were invisible to the human eye but they multiplied at such a terrific rate that they would have owned the entire earth in less than a year’s time if it had not been for certain enemies who were able to destroy them almost as fast as they were born. Whereas man could only exist under the most favourable circumstances and was forced to look for a habitat among the few small pieces of dry land located between the high mountains and the deep sea, these fellow-passengers of ours considered no summit too high and found no sea too deep for their ambitions. They were apparently made of the stuff that could survive regardless of its natural surroundings.
When we learn on eminent authority that certain varieties of insects are able to disport themselves merrily in petroleum (a substance we would hardly fancy as the main part of our daily diet) and that others manage to live through such changes in temperature as would kill all of us within a very few minutes, when we discover to our gruesome dismay that those little brown beetles, who seem so fond of literature that they are forever racing around in our bookcases, continue the even tenor of their restless days minus two or three or four legs, while we ourselves are disabled by a mere pin-prick on one of our toes, then we sometimes begin to realize against what sort of competitors we have been forced to hold our own, ever since we made our first appearance upon this whirling bit of rock, lost somewhere in the darkest outskirts of an indifferent universe.