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FROM CONSTANTINOPLE TO BATUM 41
there seemed to be indications, in the form of flat terraces on
the hillside, of a time when the sea-level was higher than it
is now. And there seemed to me to be similar indications
in the Dardanelles and on several promontories and islands
on the Greek coast. In those bygone days, when the sea
was rather higher, this ridge of land which dammed up the
Black Sea, making it into a lake cut off from the Mediterranean,
would be gradually eroded down to approximately the level
of the sea. But later on the sea sank, the Black Sea became
a lake again, and a big, strongly-flowing river poured out
again across this ridge, cutting its channel deeper and deeper.
Then the sea sank still more, far below the present sea-level,
while the river became in consequence of this still more
rapid, and accordingly cut its channel deeper, until the bottom
almost corresponded with the level of the sea. After that
the sea rose; and it continued sinking and rising several
times until it finally came to rest at the present height, while
the channel of the river became the strait wc navigate to-day.
The process must have been more or less as outlined above
if the sea varied in volume, as it must have done in the ice
ages. In the long periods when the climates of the earth
were so warm that there were no large glaciers either in
Greenland or the Antarctic, the sea was higher than now,
possibly by twenty metres or more. But in the ice ages,
when vast ice-caps covered Europe, parts of Siberia, North
America, South America, the Antarctic, and elsewhere, so
much water was held fast in these glaciers that the sea sank
far below its present level. It was only when they melted
again that the water flowed back and the sea again rose. In
the time of the lower sea-level—not so very long ago—the
Black Sea was a lake, and a mighty river flowed through the
Bosporus Valley. Already in those days there were men
dwelling in the great forests.
Wc steamed on past the lovely shores with their many
palaces peacefully mirrored in the water below and showing
no traces of the bloody days gone by. Higher up, the luxuriant
green hillsides were richly wooded. Fortunate landscape,
which the sultan’s edict had saved up to now from factories,
smoking chimneys, oil-tanks, rattling cranes and other dis
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