Even so, he knew he had to press on as quickly as possible, but there were six more days before his proposal would be presented to the council meeting. He reread his submission and spotted several embarrassing flaws he might have to defend, and his small collection of fossils seemed dismally unimpressive. At least there was something he could do about that, and he returned to the quarry and clambered about the lower terraces as best he could, used a wedge and hammer to split off thin slabs of limestone. He quickly found a nice coilshell two handspans across, and soon afterwards the imprint of the tail of a fish, but after those small successes he spent several hours cracking rock and found nothing but the usual gravel of shelly matter, passing from futile anticipation to a kind of stubborn bemusement before at last giving up and clambering to the floor of the quarry and gathering a handful of commonplace sharks’ teeth and turtle-shell fragments from the spoil heaps.

He told himself that it was just a dry spell, that finding good fossils was as much a matter of luck as persistence, and thought of a passage in one of Master Able’s monographs about the partiality of the preservation of ogre artefacts.

For the most part only commonplace artefacts, produced in teeming multitudes and discarded in places where they were quickly buried, have been discovered. Some of the ogres’ coastal cities are memorialised in thin layers of wreckage crushed into narrow strata, but their cities of the plains and deserts, if they ever existed, are entirely gone. We have discovered a few of the statues that the ogres sculpted from enduring stone, but if their most valued artforms were made from substances as ephemeral as light or cobwebs or clouds we shall never know. Most things are lost to time. In almost every case, where there should be something, there is nothing.

He had the good coilshell, the fish tail, the smaller fossils. He would come back tomorrow and try again. Meanwhile, it was late in the day and he wanted to reach the lodge by the lake, where he planned to stay overnight, before darkness fell.