Thompson lodged some eighteen authorities under the primeval water — Babylonian, Egyptian, Jewish, Siberian, a page of Oceania; exactly one resolves to served text, and it is the opening of our Kalevala. Before land exists, the daughter of the Ether comes down to the sea, conceives by wind and wave, and cannot get out: "Seven hundred years she wandered"; "Thus she swam as water-mother" [The Kalevala, Rune I]. The all-water state of the world is proved by a bird's survey: the duck seeking a nest "Cannot find a grassy hillock", "Not the smallest bit of verdure" [ibid.]. And land, when it comes, is not uncovered but made from the swimmer's body: "Where her hand she turned in water, / There arose a fertile hillock", until "Rocks were fastened in the ocean" and "Pillars of the sky were planted" [ibid.]. (The shattered world-egg on the same page has its own address, A641.) The water here is womb, not enemy — it carries the mother nine ages before it yields a shore. The remaining seventeen rows, Marquesas to Quiché, wait on wiring: a motif whose point is that everyone begins in water at present begins, for us, only in Finland.