"It began as such things always begin - in the ooze of unnoticed swamps, in the darkness of eclipsed moons. It began with a strangled gasping for air.
The pond was a place of reek and corruption, of fetid smells and of oxygen-starved fish breathing through laboring gills. At times the slowly contracting circle of the water left little windrows of minnows who skittered desperately to escape the sun, but who died, nevertheless, in the fat warm mud. It was a place of low life. In it the human brain began.
There were strange snouts in those waters, strange barbels nuzzling the bottom ooze, and there was time - three hundred million years of it - but mostly, I think, it was the ooze. .........
There are still things coming ashore." ~~~~ Loren Eisley, The Immense Journey
3 comments:
What thing is coming ashore?
For clues, click on photo to enlarge.
Ann got it right, but in an email not the blog. So, Ann here's the photo of the snapping turtle for you.
Email to Marcia said:
Spent some time looking into the writings of Loren Eiseley and discovered Darwin's Century on my bookshelves; never cracked open however. Now I will read it. Only God knows why I even have it.
Haven't solved your mystery yet though. The drag marks remind me of the huge nasty snapping turtles we had in Hampton. They returned to our property to lay their eggs. A monster was set up right beside our front steps and I tried to shoo her with a broom, very quickly learning that she was having none of that and I closed the door.
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