Before her rose a soft wall covered in cilia about as tall as she was, like a strange dwarf forest; the stomach wall, in fact. She began to scale it. Whichever route she took, the cilia curled around her, trying to grab her, but their reactions were sluggish and they came up empty every time. Daba’s eyes had now adjusted to her surroundings and to her surprise she discovered that it wasn’t totally dark in there. A faint glow suffused the space, shining through the dinosaur’s skin from the outside world. In the light she spotted four fellow ants also climbing the stomach wall. She veered off to join them.

As they began to recover from the shock of their ordeal, the five ants stared down at the vast digestive sea from which they had just extricated themselves, mesmerised by the slow churn of the viscous mire. Every so often a great bubble exploded – the source of that reverberant rumbling. When a particularly large bubble burst below her, Daba saw a thick, squat object break the surface and list slowly to one side. She recognised it as a lizard’s leg. Moments later, another massive, triangular object rose to the top. Its huge white eyes and wide mouth identified it as a fish head. Plenty more partially digested items followed, mostly either the bones and chewed-up remains of animals or the stones of wild fruits.

One of the ants beside Daba gave her a nudge, drawing her attention to the stomach wall beneath their feet. It was weeping clear mucus. The gastric secretions merged into rivulets that glistened in the faint light as they trickled down through the forest of cilia into the digestive sea below. Several of the ants were already coated in the juice. At first it simply made them prickle all over, but that soon intensified into a burning sensation not dissimilar to the aftereffects of a formic-acid attack.

‘We’re being digested!’ one of the ants shouted. Daba was surprised she could still distinguish her comrade’s pheromones from the pungent cocktail of strange odours in the stale air.

The ant was right. They were being digested by the dinosaur’s gastric juices, and their antennae were the first things to go. Daba saw that her own antennae had been half-eaten away already. ‘We need to get out of here,’ she said.

‘How? It’s so far! We don’t have the strength,’ replied one of the other ants.

‘We can’t climb out – our feet have already been digested,’ added another.

Only then did Daba notice that her own five feet had been partially consumed by the gastric juice. The feet of the other four ants had fared no better.

‘If only there was another flood to flush us out,’ the first ant said wistfully.