A Crack in the Edge of the World

A Crack in the Edge of the World Read Free Page B

Book: A Crack in the Edge of the World Read Free
Author: Simon Winchester
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earth’s inhabitants would call a Wednesday, a day that thousands of miles away, in the darkness of China and all points east, was in any case already coming to its end.
    At the moment that we find interesting—five o’clock in the morning, give or take—he could have seen the terminator line of western darkness pushing its way rapidly toward the Pacific. The earth would have been moving relentlessly at a speed of some hundreds of miles an hour eastward toward it, opening ever more populated parts of the landmasses to the light of the dawning day.
    The line at that very moment would seem to begin in the north near Melville Island in the Canadian Arctic, pass on down through Banks Island and the unpopulated and icebound wilderness of the Northwest Territories and the Yukon, through Saskatchewan and Alberta, raggedly on down through the newly created state of Montana, through the bison-and-Comanche country of Wyoming and Colorado and New Mexico, across the Rio Grande toward Acapulco, and arrive at a point on the coast where it would finally slide off the North American landmass and eventually brighten the still-inky emptiness of the Pacific Ocean.
    To the east of the line, all would have been bright and daylight. To the west, an impenetrable dark. And on the line itself, an uncertain penumbra of a few hundred miles of a swath of half dark and half light. On earth this penumbral vagueness would have translated itself into the morning twilights that early risers were experiencing just then in cities and on farms and in small villages all the way from Vancouver Island in the north down to Baja California in the south, where the day designated as April 18 was about to begin.
    It is fanciful to suppose that anyone watching so far away, in distance or in time, would have had access to a telescope that was large enough to do the job. But, assuming that such a device did exist, and that the person at this lunar viewing point had its brass and glassware trained precisely on the northern coast of California at that very particular moment, with the terminator line brightening his view inch by inch—what, precisely, would he have seen?
    The answer is inevitably dismaying to all of those who like to think that the earth and its inhabitants and the events that occur upon it have any importance at all, in a cosmic sense. For from that distance he would have seen, essentially, nothing.
    Yet at a few minutes past five in the morning of that day something did, indeed, happen.
    The planet very briefly shrugged .
    It flexed itself for a few seconds, perhaps a little short of a minute. If our observer had been acutely aware of his geography, and if he had been fortunate enough to have been staring at a very precisely defined spot in the north of California at exactly the right moment, then he would have seen what appeared to be a tiny ripple spurt in toward the coast from the sea. He would, moreover, have seen that spreading ripple as it moved slowly and steadily inshore, and then watched as it moved, fanlike and subtle, up and down the coastline as a tiny shudder . It would have seemed to him a momentary loss of focus, something that would have made his vision suddenly blur very slightly, and then just as quickly clear again.
    If he had blinked, he would have missed it. Having noticed it, however, he would probably have assumed it was more of a problem with his lens and his telescope than with the surface of the planet below. And even if he had realized that the ripple and the shudder had in fact occurred on the green and blue and white planet that floated serene in the lunar sky, he would have been quick to conclude that whatever it was had been momentary, trivial, and utterly forgettable. No more, for the earth entire, than a gentle and momentary heave of the shoulders.
T HE S TREET B EFORE M ORNING
    It was all so very different down on the surface of the planet itself. On earth, in the western part of that great entity called

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