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Part VI The Road To Us
第六部 通向我們的路
Descended from the apes! My dear, let us hope that it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known. —Remark attributed to the wife of the Bishop of Worcester after Darwin's theory of evolution was Explained to her
我們是猿的后裔！天哪，真希望這不是真的。果真是這樣的話。讓我們祈禱不要讓大家知道。——沃斯特主教的妻子對達(dá)爾文進(jìn)化論的感言
27 Ice Time
第二十七章 冰河時代
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
我做了一個夢，實際上也不完全是一個夢。
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars Did wander ... —Byron, "Darkness"
耀眼的太陽熄滅了，而星星仍在空中四處閑逛……——拜倫《黑暗》
In 1815 on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia, a handsome and long-quiescent mountain named Tambora exploded spectacularly, killing a hundred thousand people with its blast and associated tsunamis. It was the biggest volcanic explosion in ten thousand years—150 times the size of Mount St. Helens, equivalent to sixty thousand Hiroshima-sized atom bombs.
1815年，在印度尼西亞松巴哇島，一座名為坦博拉的漂亮而又長期休眠的火山突然大規(guī)模噴發(fā)，噴涌而出的熔巖以及相伴而來的海嘯奪走了10萬人的生命。這是近1萬年內(nèi)最猛烈的一次火山噴發(fā)——其規(guī)模是1980年美國圣海倫斯火山噴發(fā)的150倍，其能量相當(dāng)于6萬顆廣島原子彈。
News didn't travel terribly fast in those days. In London, The Times ran a small story—actually a letter from a merchant—seven months after the event. But by this time Tambora's effects were already being felt. Thirty-six cubic miles of smoky ash, dust, and grit had diffused through the atmosphere, obscuring the Sun's rays and causing the Earth to cool. Sunsets were unusually but blearily colorful, an effect memorably captured by the artist J. M. W. Turner, who could not have been happier, but mostly the world existed under an oppressive, dusky pall. It was this deathly dimness that inspired the Byron lines above.
那個年代消息傳播的速度非常慢。在坦博拉火山噴發(fā)后7個月，倫敦《泰晤士報》才刊登了一篇簡短報道——實際上是一封商人來信。而火山噴發(fā)所產(chǎn)生的影響，這時候人們早巳經(jīng)感覺到了。240立方公里的煙塵遍布整個大氣層，使陽光變得朦朧，地球的氣溫下降。日落時分，陽光出奇的暗淡，此情此景，被高興透頂?shù)挠嫾襃.M.W.特納捕捉下來。可是在大多數(shù)時間里，人們只能生活在令人窒息的可怕的黑暗中。這種死一般的昏暗景象給了詩人拜倫靈感，于是他寫下了本章開頭所引的那幾行詩。
