The seas, constantly and vitally surging, merging and pouring forth with an inclination to conquest inherent in their very nature, surrounded the earth, and together with the earth, revolved, extremely swiftly, in a circle of twenty-five thousand years in a single year. Yet the seas did not disperse, did not overflow or encroach on the land contiguous to them. They moved and stood still, and were protected by the command and power of a most powerful and magnificent being.
Then looking to the depths of the sea. the traveller saw that apart from the most beautiful, well-adorned and symmetrical jewels, there were thousands of different kinds of animal, sustained and ordered, brought to life and caused to die, in so disciplined a fashion, their provision coming from mere sand and salt water, that it established irresistibly the existence of a Powerful and Glorious, a Merciful and Beauteous Being administering and giving life to them.
The traveller then looks at the rivers and sees that the benefits inherent in them, the functions they perform, and their continual replenishment, arc inspired by such wisdom and mercy as indisputably to prove that all rivers.
springs, streams and great waterways flow forth from the treasury of mercy of the Compassionate One. the Lord of Glory and Generosity. They are preserved and dispensed, indeed, in so extraordinary a fashion that it is said "Four rivers flow forth from Paradise."8 That is, they transcend by far apparent causes, and flow forth instead from the treasury of a non-matcriai Paradise, from the superabundance of an unseen and inexhaustible source.
For example, the blessed Nile, that turns the sandy land of Egypt into a paradise, flows from the Mountains of the Moon in the south without ever being exhausted, as if it were a small sea. If the water that flowed down the river in six months were gathered together in the form of a mountain and then frozen, it would be larger than those mountains. But the place in the mountains where the water is lodged and stored is less than a sixth of their mass. As for the water that replenishes the river, the rain that enters the reservoir of the river is very sparse in that torrid region and is quickly swallowed up by the thirsty soil; hence it is incapable of maintaining the equilibrium of the river. A tradition has thus grown up that the blessed Nile springs, in miraculous fashion, from an unseen Paradise. This tradition has profound meaning and expresses a beautiful truth.
The traveller saw. then, a thousandth part of the truths and affirmations contained in the oceans and rivers. The seas proclaim unanimously with a power proportionate to their extent, "There is no god but He." and produce as witnesses to their testimony all the creatures that inhabit them. This, our traveller prcceived.
Expressing and conveying the testimony of the seas and the rivers, we said, in the Fourth Degree of the First Station:
There is no god hut God, the Necessary Existent, to the necessity of Whose Existence in Unity point all the seas and the rivers, together with all they contain, by the testimony of the sublimity of the comprehensiveness of the truth of subjugation, preservation, storing up, and administration, vast and well-ordered, and to be observed.
Then the traveller is summoned, on his meditative journey, by the mountains and the plains. "Read too our pages," they say. Looking he sees that the universal function and duty of mountains is of such grandeur and wisdom as to stupefy the intelligence. The mountains emerge from the earth by the command of their Sustainer, thereby palliating the turmoil, anger, and rancour that arise from disturbances within the earth. As the mountains surge upward, the earth begins to breathe; it is delivered from harmful tremors and upheavals, and its tranquillity as it pursues its duty of rotation is no longer disturbed. In the same way that masts arc planted in ships to protect them from turbulence and preserve their balance, so too mountains are set up on the deck of the ship that is the earth, as masts and stores, as is indicated by verses of the Qur'an of Miraculous Exposition such as these:
And the mountains as pegs,⁹ * And We have cast down anchors}¹⁰ And the mountains He anchored them.¹¹
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8. See. Muslim. Janna. 26. (The rivers. Sayhan. Jayhan, Euphrates, and Nile). |Tr.|
9. Qur'an. 78:7.
10. Qur'an. 50:7.
11. Qur'an. 79:32.