Note 41 — Chapter II · ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE (B) THE GROUP OF THE HIGHER CULTURES

Another blank is the history of the countryside or landscape (i.e., of the soil, with its plant-mantle and its weathering) in which man’s history has been staged for five thousand years. And yet man has so painfully wrested himself from the history of the landscape, and withal is so held to it still by myriad fibres, that without it life, soul, and thought are inconceivable.

So far as concerns the South-European field, from the end of the Ice Age, a hitherto rank luxuriance gradually gave place in the plant-world to poverty. In the course of the successive Egyptian, Classical, Arabian, and Western Cultures, a climatic change developed all around the Mediterranean, which resulted in the peasant’s being compelled to fight no longer against the plant-world, but for it—first against the primeval forest and then against the desert. In Hannibal’s time the Sahara lay very far indeed to the south of Carthage, but to-day it already penetrates to northern Spain and Italy. Where was it in the days of the pyramid-builders, who depicted sylvan and hunting scenes in their reliefs? When the Spaniards expelled the Moriscos, their countryside of woods and ploughland, already only artificially maintained, lost its character altogether, and the towns became oases in the waste. In the Roman period such a result could not have ensued.