Thanks Shimrod and DMcG.

While hurrying to finish before going to the doctor (tiny ganglion on finger, feel guilty for bothering him) I missed the reference to Texas. I had made a private prediction to myself and placed Iona a bit further north, somewhere flattish with no beaches and geology largely buried and invisible. It's much easier to understand it in areas which have been the battleground of plates on several occasions and are still mobile, even if only slightly. Texas fits, though.

One of my geology lecturers told a story about Texan senses of scale, in which some Texan students were certain that their desert was the largest, and he had to cut out Texas from a map and put it over the Sahara on a map of the same scale.

Not to poke fun at the state, but I feel if your horizon is at the same level as you are, it could be hard to understand the size of things. Even if not, seeing the curvature of the Earth over water (see above re Dover and Calais, or any loch in the Great Glen)could give the impression that it is smaller than it actually is.

I think the arguments of Delugians have somehow traded a size scale along with the heaven-knows-its-hard-enough-to-get-a-grip-of geological time. The Earth has become less massive, and the energy involved in the turbulence of their projected interpretation has become far, far, less, so that a comparison with a localised flash flood can make sense.

Homer has a passage in the Iliad in which he describes Apollo destroying the Greek defence walls as a child wrecks the fort he has built on a beach. Along with casting an interesting light on the continuity of children's activities, it also, and I suspect is designed to, casts light on the expression on Apollo's face. I don't think Homer is entirely convinced about Apollo's status as worthy of worship.

And why am I diverting into pagan behaviour? What has Apollo to do with anything real? Because I believe that by building up an image of a god who wrecks everything he has made because of the misbehaviour of one very small group of creatures (and it was, at the time, very small) they are conjuring up someone who will repel many many people from belief in the real God. In some cases I have met, they have opposed evolution because it depends on death and predation. Ironic, really.

Penny