, I give you my word, it's a blessed
revolution! . . . The earthquake? The victims? We hardly mention them!
. . . Your Franco-English raid? An old story! No, there's only one
thing that matters to-day, on this side of the Channel: England is no
longer an Island; she forms part of the European continent; she is
riveted on to France!"

"This," said Simon, "is one of the greatest facts in history!"

"It's _the_ greatest, my son. Since the world has been a world and
since men have been gathered into nations, there has been no physical
phenomenon of greater importance than this. And to think that I
predicted the whole thing, the causes and the effects, the causes
which I am the only one to know!"

"And what are they?" asked Simon. "How is it that I was able to pass?
How is it. . . ."

Old Sandstone checked him with a gesture which reminded Simon of the
way in which his former lecturer used to begin his explanations at
college; and the old codger, taking a pen and a sheet of paper,
proceeded:

"Do you know what a fault is? Of course not! Or a horst? Ditto! Oh, a
geology-lesson at Dieppe college was so many hours wasted! Well, lend
me your ears, young Dubosc! I will be brief and to the point. The
terrestrial rind--that is, the crust which surrounds the internal
fire-ball, of solidified elements and eruptive or sedimentary
rocks--consists throughout of layers superposed like the pages of a
book. Imagine forces of some kind, acting laterally, to compress those
layers. There will be corrugations, sometimes actual fractures, the
two sides of which, sliding one against the other, will be either
raised or depressed. Faults is the name which we give to the fractures
that penetrate the terrestrial shell and separate two masses of rock,
one of which slides over the plane of fracture. The fault, therefore,
reveals an edge, a lower lip produced by the subsidence of the soil,
and an upper lip produced by an elevation. Now it happens that
suddenly, after thousands and thousands of years, this upper lip,
under the action of irresistible tangential forces, will rise, shoot
upwards, and form considerable outthrows, to which we give the name of
horsts. This is what has just taken place. . . . There exists in
France, marked on the geological charts, a fault known as the Rouen
fault, which is an important dislocation of the Paris basin. Parallel
to the corrugations of the soil, which have wrinkled the cretaceous
and tertiary deposits in t