face as she turned to watch
him collect his comeuppance: with her heavy brows and silly little nose,
she had not been even near to pretty.
Where the crude tents of his own day finished, the shadowy structures
belonging to future invaders of the past continued. Bush lurched through
them, through the shadows that inhabited them, finally got beyond them
and pushed through a green thicket of gymnosperms. A little coelurosaur,
no bigger than a hen, and scuffling on its hind legs, ran out from under
his feet. It startled him, although he had not caused its fright.
Emerging from the thicket, he found himself on the bank of a wide and
slow-moving river, the one he and Ann had seen before she left him.
He sat by it with a hand over his throbbing neck. There was jungle close
at hand, the heavy, almost flowerless jungle of mid-Jurassic times,
while on the opposite side of the river, where an ox-bow was forming,
it was marshy and bullrushes and barrel-bodied cycadeoids flourished.
Bush stared at the scene for some moments, wondering what he was thinking
about it, until he realized it reminded him of a picture in a textbook,
long ago, when he was at school, before the days of mind-travel but when
-- curiously, as it now seemed -- a general preoccupation with the remote
past was evident. That would be about 2056, when his father opened his new
dentist's surgery. People had gone Victoriana-mad during that period --
his father had even installed a plastic mahogany rinse-bowl for people
to spit into. It was the Victorians who had first revealed the world of
prehistory, with its monsters so like the moving things in the depths of
the mind, and presumably one thing had led to another. Presumably Wenlock
had been influenced by the same currents of the period. But Wenlock had
turned out to be the first mind of his age, not a beaten-up failed artist.
The picture in the textbook, long ago, had had the same arrangement of river,
marsh, various plants of exotic kinds, and distant forest which now stretched
before Bush. Only the picture had also exhibited a selection of prime
reptiles: one allosaurus large on the left of the picture, picking in a
refined way at an overturned stegosaurus; next, a camptosaurus, walking
like a man with its little front paws raised almost as if it were about
to pray for the soul of the stegosaurus; its devotions were interrupted by
two pterodactyls swooping about in the middle of the picture; then came a
little fleet-foot ornitholestes, grabbing an archaeoptery out of a fern;
and lastly, on the right of the picture, a brontosaurus obligingly thrust
its long neck and head out of the river, weed hanging neatly out of its
mouth to indicate its vegetarian habit.
How simple the world of the textbook, how like and unlike reality!
This creaking old green world was never as crowded as the textbooks
claimed; nor could the animals, any more than man, exist in such single
blessedness. Nor, for that matter, had Bush ever seen a pterodactyl.
Perhaps they were scarce. Perhaps they inhabited another part of the
globe. Or perhaps it was just that some imaginative nineteenth-century
paleontologist had fitted the fossil bones of some crawling creature
together wrongly. The pterodactyl could be purely a Victorian invention,
one with Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, and Dracula.
It was hot and cloudy -- that at least squared with the picture, for none
of the animals there had cast shadows -- much like the day his mother had
said she did not love him and proved her point by shutting him out in the
garden all day. He longed now for a good old friendly brontosaurus head
to come champ-champ-champing out of the river; it might have done him some
good on that other day, too; but no brontosaurus appeared. The truth was,
the Age of Reptiles was never quite so overcrowded with reptiles as the
Age of Man with men.
As the pain within him died and his pulse rate slowed to normal, Bush made
some
him collect his comeuppance: with her heavy brows and silly little nose,
she had not been even near to pretty.
Where the crude tents of his own day finished, the shadowy structures
belonging to future invaders of the past continued. Bush lurched through
them, through the shadows that inhabited them, finally got beyond them
and pushed through a green thicket of gymnosperms. A little coelurosaur,
no bigger than a hen, and scuffling on its hind legs, ran out from under
his feet. It startled him, although he had not caused its fright.
Emerging from the thicket, he found himself on the bank of a wide and
slow-moving river, the one he and Ann had seen before she left him.
He sat by it with a hand over his throbbing neck. There was jungle close
at hand, the heavy, almost flowerless jungle of mid-Jurassic times,
while on the opposite side of the river, where an ox-bow was forming,
it was marshy and bullrushes and barrel-bodied cycadeoids flourished.
Bush stared at the scene for some moments, wondering what he was thinking
about it, until he realized it reminded him of a picture in a textbook,
long ago, when he was at school, before the days of mind-travel but when
-- curiously, as it now seemed -- a general preoccupation with the remote
past was evident. That would be about 2056, when his father opened his new
dentist's surgery. People had gone Victoriana-mad during that period --
his father had even installed a plastic mahogany rinse-bowl for people
to spit into. It was the Victorians who had first revealed the world of
prehistory, with its monsters so like the moving things in the depths of
the mind, and presumably one thing had led to another. Presumably Wenlock
had been influenced by the same currents of the period. But Wenlock had
turned out to be the first mind of his age, not a beaten-up failed artist.
The picture in the textbook, long ago, had had the same arrangement of river,
marsh, various plants of exotic kinds, and distant forest which now stretched
before Bush. Only the picture had also exhibited a selection of prime
reptiles: one allosaurus large on the left of the picture, picking in a
refined way at an overturned stegosaurus; next, a camptosaurus, walking
like a man with its little front paws raised almost as if it were about
to pray for the soul of the stegosaurus; its devotions were interrupted by
two pterodactyls swooping about in the middle of the picture; then came a
little fleet-foot ornitholestes, grabbing an archaeoptery out of a fern;
and lastly, on the right of the picture, a brontosaurus obligingly thrust
its long neck and head out of the river, weed hanging neatly out of its
mouth to indicate its vegetarian habit.
How simple the world of the textbook, how like and unlike reality!
This creaking old green world was never as crowded as the textbooks
claimed; nor could the animals, any more than man, exist in such single
blessedness. Nor, for that matter, had Bush ever seen a pterodactyl.
Perhaps they were scarce. Perhaps they inhabited another part of the
globe. Or perhaps it was just that some imaginative nineteenth-century
paleontologist had fitted the fossil bones of some crawling creature
together wrongly. The pterodactyl could be purely a Victorian invention,
one with Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, and Dracula.
It was hot and cloudy -- that at least squared with the picture, for none
of the animals there had cast shadows -- much like the day his mother had
said she did not love him and proved her point by shutting him out in the
garden all day. He longed now for a good old friendly brontosaurus head
to come champ-champ-champing out of the river; it might have done him some
good on that other day, too; but no brontosaurus appeared. The truth was,
the Age of Reptiles was never quite so overcrowded with reptiles as the
Age of Man with men.
As the pain within him died and his pulse rate slowed to normal, Bush made
some
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