Brian Aldiss - Walcot

Thomas Browne was mystified, as were you, by these great bones. Many years later, in the nineteen-eighties, the fossilized skeleton of a mammoth was found near Weybourne. Browne’s animal was very likely a mammoth too, possibly from the same herd.

Your curiosity moved you to join a schools geological expedition in the summer holidays. A group of boys and masters were taken by ship to La Rochelle, from whence a coach conveyed you all inland to a small village called Beaussais. Outside Beaussais was an extensive dig, where the remains of a Roman villa that had been buried in an earthquake were being excavated. You all stayed in a small hotel just a kilometre away from the site.

The dig had been roped off. Topsoil, on which grass grew, lay in piles outside the ropes. All that had been revealed of the villa so far was a paved pathway with a broken pillar standing at one end of the path. To one side, a radial ditch had been dug, leading nowhere. Your companions were excited. You felt only disappointment; you do not know what you had been expecting. A revelation of some kind?

Your lack of enthusiasm was noticed by one of the masters superintending you. He was not from your school. His face was roughly the shape and colour of a plum. His hair was well-oiled and curly. He wore khaki shorts and heavy boots, with thin, hairy legs showing in the exposed area between them. His name was Mr Loftus.

‘Have you no interest in Roman villas?’ he asked.

You thought, what was another Roman villa? but could not articulate the thought. You hung your head.

‘A mile from here there’s a more interesting site, where a meteorite struck. Would you be interested in looking at that?’

His dark eyes regarded you rather contemptuously.

‘Yes,’ you said, although something in your head warned you to say no.

You went with Mr Loftus, following him up the slope. The ground was broken and stony. No trees grew, only clumps of bracken and furze; it was a landscape scraped bare.

Looking ahead at Mr Loftus’s hairy legs working their way onwards, and Mr Loftus’s boots, clumping along on your eye level, you conceived a hatred for all boots, reflecting that those who had power – the power represented by the boots – could do whatever they liked. You felt it to be your destiny always to be on an eye level with boots, plod, plod, plodding: boots with their studs, with their horseshoe-shaped metal shodding. There was a feeling in your stomach, totally unformed by intellect, that in only a few years – three at most – the world would be full of the clamour of metal-shod marching boots.

All your concerns about bursting into adulthood, a butterfly from a chrysalis – about how your career would go, about how you would earn money, about whether your friends liked you or secretly despised you – all those concerns would be kicked away by the legions of boots that even then were preparing to march in Germany, and out of Germany into neighbouring countries.

I am surprised you know what I thought then. I hardly knew my own thoughts.

They were deep within me .

You are not surprised. Nothing can surprise you here .

Yes, but those unspoken thoughts .

They were recorded. There are no privacies, no surprises here .

You climbed for about an hour before the ground levelled off. Mr Loftus continued to plod on, while you stopped to look at the view. From your vantage point, the country in the main looked flat. To the north, the serpentine bends of the river Niortaise gleamed in the sunshine. More distantly, the higher ground of the Sèvres region was obscured by a heat mist. Only faint noises arose from humanity below, challenged by nearer bird calls, plangent in the thin air. The sight of this beautiful sparse foreign land awoke vibrations within you.

You walked now on bare rock. Mr Loftus stopped at last. The boots were at rest, the knees of the hairy legs companionable together. Mr Loftus mopped his brow with a blue handkerchief. A whisper of breeze was keeping the temperature down in this high place.

‘Here we are,’ he said. He was breathing heavily.

‘This is it,’ he said. ‘Few people know about this.’

He indicated a wide hole in the rock. Cracks meandered in several directions from the crater, like tributaries running into the sea. The interior of the crater was more or less smooth, except where a portion had been cut away. A rusty pick lay beside the cut.

‘Get down in it, lad,’ he said.

You did as you were bid, climbing into the rock. The lip of the crater came above your head, obscuring sight of anything beyond the crater but the blue sky. You recollected that experience much later in life. As you stared at the layered rock, Loftus explained what you were seeing. A thin broken dark band of what resembled rust separated two types of rock.

‘The burn marks where the asteroid struck.’ He squatted, so that his bare knees gleamed, to pick up a fragment and show it you. ‘We call this stuff breccia . A small asteroid came in from space and left this burn signature in the rocks. It struck about forty million years ago, long before France or mankind itself was thought of. See how the stratum above the burn is quite dark. Then comes lighter rock. There, fossils begin. Just a few. I’d guess this darker rock signifies at least five hundred thousand years of ocean which followed the asteroid strike.’

He picked at it and laid a fragment in the palm of his left hand.

‘What are the fossils?’ you asked.

‘Nothing important. Squirrels. A thing like a present-day fox –’

You listened to this matter-of-fact account, and all the while you were staring at the exposed rock face, the grits and stone of which Earth’s crust was composed, which would have meant nothing to ordinary people. Yet, given knowledge – the sort of knowledge you longed to acquire – a terrestrial drama lay before you. It was an enigma which, given knowledge, could meet with understanding. This was an explanation for the terrible catastrophe, the sudden destruction, which had puzzled Hugh Miller. A key turned in your mind.

‘It’s amazing, Sir,’ you said. ‘Everyone ought to know about this place!’

‘It’s not important,’ Mr Loftus said, indifferently. ‘It’s been examined and recorded. Hundreds of such impacts have been recorded all over the world. It goes to demonstrate what geologists already understand, that our planet, throughout the eons, has been constantly bombarded by comets, meteors, asteroids and assorted bits of rock.’

You had never before heard anyone use the phrase ‘our planet’ for the Earth. It seemed to weaken you, to make your legs tremble.

‘All that time,’ you murmured.

‘From time immemorial up to the present day.’

‘But it is important, Sir,’ you insisted weakly.

‘No. Not in itself. It’s been recorded. Rock fragments have been analysed and their iridium content noted. It’s now an item in a ledger in the Paris Institute of Geology.’

‘Coo, I’d like to find something like this myself, Sir! What’s iridium?’

Loftus went on to explain that the metal iridium was rare on the surface of the Earth, but abundant in the meteoritic dust arriving from space. You found it hard to tell from his attitude whether he believed you knew more of such matters than you did, or whether he thought you a complete ignoramus on whom further explanation was wasted.

You were entirely taken up by this connection between ‘our planet’ and the objects which arrived from distant places beyond your most fervid imagining. You were seized by a glimpse of the solar system as a whole. A new light, you felt, was lit in your intellect.

Yes, I think I did feel that .

I’m telling you, you did .