1On the south coast of England there is a small town called Lyme, where the land ends in cliffs of grey stone and blue clay. The cliffs are not strong. Every winter the rain soaks them and the sea bites them, and pieces as big as churches slide down onto the beach. The town has always lived in a little fear of its own hills.
2In that town, in the last year of the old century, a girl was born to a poor carpenter named Richard Anning. They called her Mary.
3When she was fifteen months old, a neighbour woman carried her out to see some riders showing their tricks in a field. A storm came up. The woman ran under an elm tree with the baby in her arms, and two other women ran in beside her. Then the lightning struck the elm. All three women died where they stood. The baby was carried home limp, and put in warm water, and she opened her eyes.
4The town said ever after that the lightning had made her sharp. It is a good tale. But lightning makes no one clever. What made Mary Anning sharp was hunger, and a father who took her down to the shore.
5For Richard Anning had a second trade. The cliffs of Lyme were full of strange stones. There were stones coiled like sleeping snakes, and stones like the points of arrows, and stones like the knuckles of a great backbone. The town called them snake-stones, and devil's fingers, and verteberries. No one knew what they were. But fine visitors had begun to come to Lyme in summer for the sea air, and fine visitors would pay for a curiosity. So Richard gathered them and laid them on a table outside his shop.
6He took Mary and her brother Joseph with him along the beach, even on the Sabbath, and the chapel people shook their heads. He showed them how to look. Not at the whole cliff, he said. A cliff will tell you nothing. Look for the one line that is too straight, the one curve that is too round. Stone does not make circles. Something that was alive makes circles.
7Then one night Richard fell from the cliff path in the dark. He lived, but he was never well again, and a wasting cough came on him. He died when Mary was eleven. He left a wife and two children, and debts greater than everything they owned.
8They ate by the parish that winter, which means they ate little and with shame. And Mary went back down to the shore alone, because it was the only field she knew how to harvest.
9You must understand what that work was. The best finds come after the worst storms, when a fresh fall has opened the cliff. So she went out in winter, when the wind came off the sea like a blade. She went at the turn of the tide, for there are places under those cliffs where the beach is narrow, and the sea comes in behind you and shuts the way home. She walked below hanging clay that could come down without a sound. And she had to be quick. What the cliff gave in the night, the tide took by the next evening, and ground to nothing.
10One day she found a snake-stone as wide as her hand, perfect in every coil. A lady stopped her in the street and gave her half a crown for it. Half a crown was bread for a week. Mary stood looking at the coin. She understood then that she had a trade.
11In the year after their father died, Joseph found a thing in the rocks that frightened him. It was a head. It was four feet long, with a long jaw full of pointed teeth, and a great round eye socket with a ring of bony plates inside it, like the petals of a flower. He dug it out and carried it home with a friend. The town came to look. A crocodile, people said. Some old crocodile that had swum in from the sea and died.
12But a head has a body. Joseph was bound apprentice to a chair-maker and had no days to spare. So the body was left to Mary.
13She searched for a year. She learned that stretch of cliff as a monk learns one page. And after a winter storm she found it, high up, a line of verteberries running into the clay, each one where it should be. She was twelve years old, some say thirteen. She could not dig it out herself. She hired men with picks, and she stood beneath them and told them where to cut, a child giving orders to quarrymen, and they obeyed her because she plainly knew.
14What came out of the cliff was seventeen feet long. It had a backbone of many joints, laid in a row like a string of beads. It had ribs, and four limbs like paddles. It was no crocodile. It was no fish. It was like nothing that lived in any sea on earth.
15The lord of the manor paid the Annings twenty-three pounds for it. It went to London and was shown to the crowds, and learned men wrote about it and gave it a name that means fish-lizard. Not one of them wrote down the name of the child who had found it.
16Mary stood and looked at the hollow in the cliff where it had lain. She asked herself what the learned men were asking, and what Asha asked beside the first fire: where does it go when it goes out?
17For here was the trouble, and it was a great one. Most people of that time believed the world had been made whole and complete, a few thousand years before, with every kind of creature in it. They believed no kind was ever lost, for why would a good Maker let any link of his chain be broken? Yet here was a creature no sailor had ever seen. Either it still swam in some far sea, or its whole kind had died. Every one. A door that had been open was shut, and for ever.
18Mary was a believer all her life. She went to chapel and read her Bible, and she did not think the stones made war on her faith. But she would not look away from what was in front of her eyes. She had found the thing. It was real, and it was gone from the world. If that was so, then the world was not as simple as she had been told, and she would rather know it.
19The years after were hard ones. A wonder is found once in a great while, and bread is wanted every day. There was a year when the Annings sold their furniture to pay the rent, and had found nothing of worth for many months. A collector named Birch, who had bought from them, heard of it. He sold his whole collection of stone creatures at auction and gave the money to the family. He said that those who had found nearly every fine thing that men of learning had studied should not live in want. That gift kept the door of their shop open.
20And Mary taught herself. She had hardly been to school, but she got hold of the papers that the learned men wrote, and copied them out by hand, pictures and all, because she could not buy them. She cut open fish and squid from the fishermen's baskets to see how living bodies were made, so that she could read dead ones. She found that certain grey lumps in the cliff were the droppings of the old sea-beasts, turned to stone, with the scales of their last meals still inside. No one had guessed it before her.
21When she was twenty-four she found her second dragon. It was stranger than the first. It had a small head on a neck as long as its body, like a snake threaded through a turtle. She drew it carefully and sent the drawing to London.
22The drawing went on to Paris, to the greatest judge of bones then living, a baron named Cuvier. He looked at it and said it could not be. No creature had so many bones in its neck. He warned that someone might have joined the head of a sea-snake to the body of another beast, to cheat the buyers.
23Think what that meant. Mary Anning had one thing in the world, and it was her good name. If Cuvier called her a cheat, no one would buy from her again. Her mother would go back on the parish. And she could not answer him. A meeting was called in London, at the society of the men who studied the earth, to decide the matter. She could not speak there. She could not even sit there. No woman was let through that door, and she was a carpenter's daughter besides.
24So she waited in Lyme while gentlemen argued over her honesty a hundred and fifty miles away. They argued late into the night. But the bones themselves had come up to London by sea. And when the men looked at the bones and not the drawing, they saw there was no join and no trick. The creature was real. Cuvier himself said so at last, and said it handsomely. After that no one doubted what Mary Anning dug.
25She was right, and it did not make her rich. The gentlemen came down to Lyme and walked the shore with her, and she showed them where to look. Then they went home and wrote their papers, and put their own names to them. She said little about it. She knew what she knew.
26And what did she know? Hear it, for it is the reason she stands in this book.
27She knew the cliff was a book with its pages lying flat. Each layer of stone had once been mud on the floor of a sea. The lowest layers were laid down first and the highest last. So to climb the cliff was to walk forward through time, and to dig down was to walk back.
28She knew that different layers held different creatures. Low down there were kinds that never appeared higher up. The world of the fish-lizards was not the world of men with a few beasts missing. It was another world altogether, with its own sea and its own shore, and it had lasted long, and it had ended.
29And she knew, from the slowness of mud, that the pages had not been written quickly. A finger's width of that grey stone was more years than her whole town had stood. And the cliff was hundreds of feet high. And under the beach it went on down.
30In those same years a man of law named Charles Lyell was walking the cliffs and river-banks of Europe. He set it all out in a book that many read. The earth, he said, was shaped by nothing stranger than what we see at work today: rain, and rivers, and the slow lifting of the land. But if such small causes built the mountains, they must have had time beyond all counting to do it. The earth was not a few thousand years old. It was old past the reach of any number that people used.
31Mary Anning did not need the book. She had the cliff. She had put her hand on the deep of time and felt that it had no floor.
32Then the cliff took its payment.
33She had a dog, a small black and white one named Tray. He went with her everywhere on the shore. When she found something she could not carry, Tray would lie down beside it and guard the place until she came back with help. He had been her only fellow worker for years.
34One autumn day she was walking under the cliff with Tray a few steps ahead of her. There was no warning. Cliffs give none. A mass of stone and clay came down across the beach, with a sound like a great breath let out. When the dust cleared, Mary was standing unhurt at its edge. Tray was under it.
35She wrote of it afterward to a friend, a lady in London. She said the death of her faithful old dog had quite upset her, and that the cliff had fallen on him and killed him in a moment before her eyes, and close to her feet. It had been but a moment, she wrote, between her and the same fate.
36She went back out the next week. What else was there to do? The rent did not wait, and the tide did not, and somewhere in the new fall there might be a line too straight or a curve too round.
37She lived to be forty-seven. A sickness of the breast took her slowly. Near the end, the men who studied the earth did what they had never done for anyone outside their door: they raised money to ease her last years, and when she died their president spoke her praise before the whole society. It was the first time they had so honoured anyone who was not a member, and they would not admit a woman as a member for more than half a century after.
38It was little, and it was late. She had opened a door for them, and they had walked through it without holding it for her.
39But the door stayed open. That is the thing about a door. Because of a hungry girl on a winter beach, the world was now very old. It was old enough for slow things to happen in it. It was old enough for a sea to become a cliff. And kinds of creatures could vanish from it, which meant, though no one yet dared say it aloud, that kinds of creatures might also have come into it, one after another, down the long years.
40Someone would have to say it aloud. He was already at sea. He was a young gentleman, sick in his hammock on a small ship bound for the far side of the world, and he had Lyell's book open on his knees.