Prologue

 

Saccharum officinarum

 

This story starts several hundred million years ago.  The exact timing doesn’t really matter.  You only need to get the gist of what happened.  

The day started the same as they had for tens of thousands of years.  The sun rose and the temperature followed.  The cold-blooded animals stirred.  The heated air cloaked all life on Earth in an embryonic cocoon.  And the air was warmer today, noticeably warmer than usual.  

There were many more animals as of late, all different kinds.  The diversity of life was exploding all around.  That’s what happens when an ice age ends, when the Earth warms.  The resulting tropical conditions foster all kinds of evolutionary experiments.

It was the end of the Paleozoic era.  It was one of those fulcrums in the history of the Earth, a springtime to end all springtimes, a great awakening.

Plants were large in this day.  Giant ferns dominated the interior, but in the coastal plains near the oceanic waters, another type of organism thrived.  These were the grasses.  One of these specimens in particular grew in giant clumps.  This invasive plant had large, noded reeds that reached to the sky.  It was a perennial and therefore multiplied in abundance along the coast.  It was the ancestor of what today we call sugarcane.  However, this organism was much larger than the cane we are familiar with in the twenty-first century.  The reeds were massively tall and looked like today’s pine trees, flowing in the summer wind.

Millions of years later, this part of the Earth was to become known as Southeast Asia.   To be exact, it would be called New Guinea.  At this point in history, however, the area still shared a coastline with the landmass that would become Australia.   But alas, this was not to last.

 

The animals became agitated.  Something strange was happening.  The large array of reptiles was moving to higher ground.  Somehow that sixth sense that animals often possess had kicked into high gear.  Something was going to happen.  The air became very still.

 

There was a deafening crash as the natural dam made from glacial-carved rock in the mountains gave way high above the coastline.  A few hundred thousand years of melted ice behind it had created enormous pressure.  It could no longer hold.   The water cascaded down from the higher ground like a prehistoric Niagara Falls, only bigger.  The seas began to rise.  

One particular clump of the cane was perched on an outcrop of rock overlooking the rising ocean.  The water from the breached natural dam rushed over it and instantly knocked the entire plant into the sea.  The resulting deluge of sediment from the oncoming flood covered the plant entirely.  It had no chance to decay.  Over the millennia, the layer of sediment above it slowly turned into rock, becoming a hard seal.

Layer upon layer of sediment was deposited above it across the ages.  These too turned to stone.  

Over a few hundred thousand years, the pressure began to build.