Jehovah's Day [antikvár]

CHAPTER I I The day began, the day I have chosen because it is the only one I knew of Jehovah's days, with the appearance on the swampy shore of an inland sea, one hundred millión years ago by the clock on the mantelpiece, of a strange and clumsy creature, my grotesque father. Eryops, the Mud Puppy, was his name, and his appearance was shocking, for nothing like him had ever been seen on the earth. He was an ugly brute, a giant tadpole four feet long, small brained and slow, with a wide flat head, no forehead, chin or neck, but he had a backbone, and under his thick heavy body four short legs with paddle-like feet and a weighty flattened tail. The Cosmos noticed him as he emerged from his comfortable ooze. How I do not know, since I am bound to think of him as very small in comparison to Jupiter and Betelgeuse, flicking my inward eye from star to tadpole. Effort of frightened thought, straining of eyes, ears and nose, it is not this way that the Cosmos is aware, but perhaps, all the same, the faint nőise of my father's great feet and scaly tail scraping the muddy bank sounded across the hush of the dreaming unpeopled earth like thunder, travelled up and out