Time Song

by Julia Blackburn

  in the summer,

  accumulated snow in winter.

  Damp soils such as these

  support floodplain meadows.

  The fact of the presence of sage,

  sneezeweed

  and other herbs and mosses

  suggests grazing areas

  of open grassland.

  Clear skies

  lead to deep thaws in the summer,

  such an arid climate favours

  dried grasses

  and willow shrubs:

  good fodder for large herbivores.

  The exact cause of the death

  of this particular mammoth

  cannot be ascertained with certainty,

  but the poor preservation

  of the digested vegetation

  seems to indicate it took place

  between autumn and early spring

  and he was foraging for dead leaves,

  along with seeds and the fruits of plants,

  exposed by the melting snow.

  The willow twigs,

  though broken,

  had not been well chewed

  – maybe the worn molars were to blame –

  and consider the added stress

  of low nutrient levels

  in such a land,

  especially during the winter.

  Lying in a sheltered hollow

  the mammoth died,

  and a thick layer of mud

  slumped over him

  and froze him

  into its icy heart,

  keeping him

  – or at least a part of him –

  intact

  for twenty-two thousand

  five hundred years,

  until he was found

  and carried away,

  to be studied.

  Based on ‘The Ecological Implications of a Yakutian Mammoth’s Last Meal’ by Dick Mol et al., Quaternary Research 69, 2008, pp. 361–76. I understand that this is a very similar landscape to the Mammoth Steppes.

  17

  I returned to Holland a few months later so that Sandra and I could go on a boat trip with Klaas and an invited group of palaeontologists.

  Sandra’s broken shoulder was almost mended, but then she tripped and broke the bone on the other side in a silly accident probably caused by the awkwardness of compensating for feeling awkward. So I was again driving her Alfa Romeo. It felt even older since the last time.

  We were going to be setting off quite early in the morning from a port in Zeeland and Sandra had booked us a bungalow in a holiday village. The sun was shining when we reached this nest of little wooden dwellings; people were sitting on their verandas and getting mildly tipsy on white wine. Sandra had stayed here before when she was working on a documentary film about a murder that took place in the neighbouring village. It was an odd story. All the inhabitants of the village were under suspicion and had to give DNA samples. The DNA proved that a young teenager was the murderer, and everyone, including him, was very surprised by this information.

  The next morning we drove to the port and Klaas welcomed us on board the boat. We were the last to arrive; the engines were thudding and the palaeontologists were sitting around eating sandwiches, the air filled with chatter and enthusiasm.

  The smell of diesel and the thud of the engine brought me back to a journey I made to the island of St Helena, travelling with my first husband and our two young children, alongside three thousand fresh eggs, a number of live sheep and forty Saints, as the island’s inhabitants are called. The journey took sixteen days and when it was rough we lay in our bunks, enveloped by that same noise and smell.

  But this was a very different sort of expedition. The boat entered a placid sea with protective islands on each side of us and no sign of a wave anywhere. I had thought we would be going out to the Brown Banks or the Westerschelde from where Klaas had fished up those most ancient stone beasts. I had imagined all of us holding tight while the boat bucked and shuddered and the nets swung in with their loads of heavy bones. I said something to Klaas and he smiled and made a gesture to all the grey heads around me, my own included. I had a brief image of palaeontologists tumbling overboard and sinking down to settle among their own research projects.

  The boat was a mussel catcher. It carried curious box-shaped nets made of metal chains, two of them on each side fixed to a beam and at various times these beams were swung out and the nets lowered into the water on hawsers. Once they had been pulled along the seabed for a while they were brought up spluttering into the air. Whatever they had gathered was tipped out into the shallow hold, while the palaeontologists gathered round to look. The first thing that dropped out of the net was a piece from the lower jaw of a whale, quickly followed by the rather beautiful part of the vertebra called the atlas, where the head joins the spine. Klaas said these bones came from the same beast and were ten million years old, give or take. They were placed on the metal hatch in the stern of the ship, next to a coffee urn and a tower of white plastic cups.

  The workings of a whale’s inner ear were next: a shell-shaped object made of stone that was the perioticum and a slightly smaller stone thing that looked like the soft body of a snail which was the tympanum bulla. They were too large to fit in the palm of my hand and the skull from which they came would have been about three metres long.

  The nets also brought up the fossilised excrement from a very long worm, an early relative of the lugworm. Then there was a shark’s tooth and lots of bits of hip or head or back which Klaas was quick to identify. A shiny length of very black bone with a slight bend to it was the rib of a manatee that had swum in this ocean when it was a tropical sea.

  I had dreaded being confronted with heaps of dead or dying fish, but not many materialised. There were quite a few spider crabs sidling cautiously out of danger and most of them were thrown back, although some were put in Tupperware containers by a man who was making a crab collection for the Rotterdam Natural History Museum.

  In between the swoop and spill of the nets, people talked together. One palaeontologist told me that his speciality was shrews, a species that interested him because shrews have remained almost entirely unchanged for thirty-five million years. I thought of the black shrew incisor that Jonathan had given me, that I now kept in a little box alongside my earrings.

  A bone biologist with a mild squint which somehow made her look as if she was about to tell a joke said she had been a university teacher until she became too ill to teach and now she did freelance work with bones. She was clearly very happy with her job. She spoke of the absurdity of separating us humans from other living creatures, especially when you consider how a baby in the womb goes through its own evolution, starting off like a newt with bunches of aquatic gills. She asked what I thought of my country having just voted to leave Europe and I said it made me sad because I had always felt more European than English.

  A man with crowded teeth and a very bony head produced a Geiger counter from a box that looked like a businessman’s briefcase. He presumed I was a fellow scientist and began to discuss the possible causes of the concentration of uranium in the bones we were finding. He said of course the pH of calcium in bones is the same as the pH of uranium and so a natural transference could occur. The Geiger counter squealed in response to each new find. The manatee made it especially noisy.

  Sandra said how odd it was for all these bones to be disturbed after they had been left in peace for millions of years and even the most unexceptional bit of tooth or bone is going to be filed away in a labelled box in a dark storeroom in a museum. She said she kept thinking of the Antiques Roadshow, which is also very popular in Holland; people gathered around each new item hauled up from the seabed, eager to know its provenance and age and its value, eve
n though bones are rarely worth much.

  Klaas was not entirely happy with the expedition. He said the mussel nets were a new design and they didn’t go deep enough or scoop hard enough. Also he would have liked the skipper to have taken us a bit further out, rather than staying within this narrow passage between the islands. He’d wanted to be able to show us land mammals; they were what interested him most and there was always something so magical about bringing them up out of the sea. But he was courteous in spite of his disappointment and said I was welcome to come back the next year.

  18

  Another day and Sandra and I and her partner and her son were driving to the Rotterdam Europoort. Exit 87000 was our destination.

  The Europoort is a city in its own right, but a city almost without people. The buildings are as abstract as big art installations and yet they have their practical purpose. We passed huge brightly coloured hangars without windows or visible doors, only their logos to identify them. Electricity pylons strode across the landscape, seeming to know where they were going and why. We followed long streets flanked by huge tanks containing crude oil or gas, silver-coated pipes twisting around each other like internal organs, while tall chimneys rose up to the heavens. Some of these chimneys emitted flames that were almost without colour, others produced steady streams of white smoke, intersecting the blue of the sky. Both the flames and the smoke looked curiously pure, but I was aware of a raw trace of their chemistry sitting in the back of my throat and the front of my head, like a feeling of unease or perhaps of fear.

  The buildings, tanks and pipes were surrounded by high metal fences and well-cut grass. I saw a rabbit eating the grass. I saw a buzzard sitting on a post, observing the rabbit. My Dutch friends said how nice it was to be going to the seaside and they were much less disconcerted by their surroundings than me.

  The place we were heading for is a visitors’ centre called Futureland and once we had identified the turning we were led to a big car park, surrounded by a curious display of rusting machinery: wheels and grabbers, sifters and lifters, spreaders and shakers and spouters, all of them as big as a car or even a lorry and looking like the fossilised remains of ancient life forms.

  In order to facilitate the navigation route of the increasingly large ships that need to enter Rotterdam harbour, a channel called the Eurogully is currently being deepened from thirteen metres to thirty. A notice next to the abandoned machinery explained that two hundred and forty sacks of sand are scooped up every day and then blasted on to the new beach called Maasvlakte, which was our destination.

  We entered the Futureland information centre. There were lots of other people here, all of them waiting to be taken to the beach to look for fossils. We had a leader who called us to gather around him and then said we must have a quick look at the Futureland museum before we set out. The museum consisted of a few glass display cabinets holding a few fossils placed on fine sand in the company of shells and bits of seaweed. There were several artists’ impressions of mammoth and other extinct mammals going about their daily business.

  We were herded on to a bus, obedience creeping over us like a miasma. The bus carried us a few hundred yards and then we stepped out. We followed our leader across a sandbank and here was the newly created beach: a pristine sweep of sand with the sea lap-lapping at its edges and the odd seagull swooping overhead. Suddenly the smoking chimneys, the pipes and hangars and fences and even the rabbit, seemed as far away as if they had never existed.

  We were given another little talk about what we were looking for and then we set off to look. There were many other eager collectors foraging across the sand and I realised that in order to find anything you needed to come here at first light, possibly just after a storm.

  The odd thing about this beach and what it holds is that everything is jumbled up. The area that is being dredged was once part of the Rhine, and so as well as carrying fertile sediment, it also carried evidence of the many creatures that had lived and died along its banks. Now the machines that are deepening the Eurogully are sucking up all of this prehistory and spraying it out at random across the new beach. For palaeontologists it has proved to be a very important site because so many of the smaller and perhaps more interesting pieces of bone as well as human artefacts and remains are missed in the trawl from fishing boats.

  I found something I thought I recognised as a coprolite, a piece of fossilised poo, probably from a hyena, but when I proudly showed it to our leader, he gave me a rather pitying look and told me it was just a pebble. I suddenly felt like a six-year-old on a school trip and I pottered off in a vague huff and sat on the sand to watch sand fleas and to look towards the coast of England, out of sight but not so very far away.

  Part Two

  Middle Time

  The land is a sea in waiting.

  MATTHEW HOLLIS, Stones

  19

  October 2015 and I flew home from a little airport in the north of Holland. The flight was delayed, so I sat on a bench in the departure lounge for several hours, trapped in the curious limbo that comes from having presented your passport to an official, so you cannot leave the non-place you have been allowed to enter.

  The flight, when it finally happened, was beautiful. This was an old-fashioned prop plane and once it had made a lot of noisy effort to rise into the air, it flew surprisingly low. By now it was the end of the day and the soft light of the misty sun covered the North Sea with a rippled skin of silver and gold.

  I had a window seat. Convivial lines of fishing boats were spread out beneath me. They appeared to be quite still and even the wake that showed where they had come from was without apparent movement.

  As we approached the English coast, the shift of the light turned the sea transparent. I could look through it on to drowned mudflats and on to the arterial systems of branching river beds that flowed around submerged islands of yellow-tinged sand. In some areas little waves erupted where a patch of muddy land had broken through into the other element.

  The solemn white presences of wind turbines stood in rows, a Greek chorus. I felt that if I was close enough, I would hear the words of their song. Some held their fluted wings motionless, others turned them like the slow hands of a clock.

  I kept thinking my husband was sitting next to me. I remembered the many times we had crossed this sea and how whenever I made the journey it was as if I was leaving one version of myself behind and taking on the changed identity that comes from becoming a stranger, born somewhere else, speaking a different language.

  Staring down through the sea on to the country that lay beneath it, I could easily turn the fishing boats into grazing animals, the wind turbines into trees, the ripple of waves into grasses swaying in the wind, the rivers again flowing like the rivers they once were, the islands emerging and shaking themselves dry.

  In another of those faxes my husband sent me during our year of being often apart, he made a drawing of the island of Britain, with continental Europe on the other side of the North Sea, and he marked the area that separated us with urgent circling lines, ringed around with little dots of longing. I realise now that it looks for all the world like a map of Doggerland.

  Time Song 7

  The most recent incarnation of Doggerland begins

  twenty thousand years ago:

  the world cold and dry,

  thunder and lightning,

  a restless wind blowing,

  the air thick with dust.

  North of where I am here

  everything is covered by a blanket of ice,

  and where I am here:

  a frozen desert.

  But the cold is softening,

  plants are on the move,

  seeds and spores carried by the wind

  taking root in shallow soil:

  tall grasses with silver plumes,

  short grasses sprea
ding in clumps.

  The cold softening,

  plants on the move,

  seeds and spores

  carried on feather and fur,

  on feet and in faeces,

  taking root in deeper soil:

  thistle and knapweed,

  cranesbill and stork-bill,

  wild fennel and wild parsnip,

  goosefoot and wormwood,

  spread out across the land.

  This is the song of seventeen thousand years ago

  and the earth is warmer still:

  dwarf willow and artemisia

  – named after the goddess

  who came much later –

  a first scattering of birch trees

  within more sheltered valleys.

  During the summer months

  you can see horses,

  their coats the colour of winter grass;

  great herds of reindeer,

  and small human groups,

  out hunting.

  Thirteen thousand five hundred years ago:

  the woodlands spreading

  oak and elm on higher ground.

  Reindeer and horse have gone north,

  in search of open grasslands,

  elk and aurochs, red deer and wild boar

  move through the camouflage of dappled light.

  Thirteen thousand years ago

  and a volcano erupts in what is now Germany:

  a blanketing of ash and debris,

  darkened skies.

  Twelve thousand seven hundred years ago

  Ice Age cold returns

  stripping the land

  of all but the simplest vegetation.

  Fires consume the dead trees,

  grasses once again cover the tundra steppes

  and a flowering shrub,

  Dryas octopetala,

  does very well.

  It has eight white petals,