© David Staume 2006

Be careful what you wish for

Once upon a time there was a king who believed that cleanliness and kingliness went hand in hand. Constantly harassed by the dust from the nearby fields, and grime from the nearby chimneys – which all seemed to blow in on purpose – he spent a considerable portion of each day barking instructions and abuse at his staff.

One day, while fuming over layers of dirt in a storeroom, the king picked up an old brass lamp and rubbed away some dust. Well, strangely enough, out pooofed a genie! After explaining that not every genie is the three-wish kind, the genie offered to grant the king a single wish. As the king had lots of loot, absolute power, and wenches by the score, he wished for the world to be rid of dust. With his wish granted, he fired his cleaning staff and threw himself onto his large four-poster bed – to await the end of the world.

Well, he didn’t know it at the time, but that’s exactly what happened.

When the king awoke the next morning, funny things were going on. The sky had turned an ominous dark blue-black and the stars were visible … in the daytime! Gone was that near-uniform lovely blue – the result of the refraction of light as it passes through a thin layer of dust in the upper atmosphere.

Next to go were the gorgeous tints of sunrise and sunset. No more reds, oranges, or purples; no more gin and tonics on the balcony while watching the sun go down. There were no colours to the sunset at all. With no sunlight coming tangentially through thick layers of dust-laden atmosphere and bouncing off the underside of clouds, spectacular sunsets were a thing of the past. The sun just slowly slid off the end of the world and that was that!

Then the king realized that something else was missing. The clouds had gone as well! With no solid particles in the atmosphere there was nothing for the water vapour to condense around.

Something that did continue, however, was evaporation – the sun still shone, evaporating the water from the land and sea, so the water still rose into the atmosphere.

The next morning the king woke to find that his sheets were wet. Had it rained? No, he was inside. It was dew. With evaporation continuing and no clouds able to form, the air was becoming super-saturated.

Within a few weeks the end of the world was nigh. High above the king’s head the upper atmosphere had become like an over-full bladder, but the only place it could relieve itself was where the atmosphere came into contact with solid matter. At the tops of the highest mountains the equivalent of whole lakes started to condense, sending veritable tsunamis down their slopes. Buildings, vegetation, animals, humans, were all swept away. Unlike a tsunami, however, which comes and goes, the torrents pouring down the mountainsides didn’t stop – at all – day or night.

The deluge on the mountainsides also set up wind currents so that equilibrium could be restored. The effect of these was to pull more and more super-saturated air toward them. Before long every wind was blowing toward a mountain range, bringing even more water and more destruction. With the mountains acting like huge plug-holes, and sucking all the water vapour from the non-mountainous areas, the flat areas of the earth soon became arid and unable to support vegetation. With the flat lands laid waste and the mountains turned to seas, the earth was uninhabitable.

It seems that no one had taught the king that the earth owes its habitability and much of its beauty to dust. Well … that and a few other things.

The moral of this story? First, that everything – no matter how irritating or seemingly insignificant – probably has an important place in the scheme of things. Second, that the next time we see dust in our house we should be overcome with gratitude, even as we pull out the vacuum cleaner. And third, and probably most important of all, we should be careful what we wish for.

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