There is a warm dry cave the quick things have hollowed for themselves, and they carry their heat into it and set it down in rows. This is new. A blink ago the ground here was mud, then it was mud that had been flattened, then this. I have watched three or four such caves rise and soften and fall in the time it takes me to notice a crack has begun.
The soft creatures gather in the rows and do the strangest thing they do, which is nothing, only faster than I have ever seen nothing done. They vibrate in place. One taps its foot at a speed that would wear a valley flat. They rise, they sit, they rise. They stare at little lit stones held in their paws.
Some leak from the face, briefly, and then the leak dries, exactly as the rain dries on me, and I understand it no better and no worse.
Their heat comes and goes through the far door. A warm one is carried out. A warm one walks in cold with worry and leaves warm with relief, or the reverse, and to me these are the same event, a shadow crossing and uncrossing my flank on a long afternoon.
They believe, I think, that everything is being decided here, right now, that this hour is the hinge of all hours. It is a lovely thing to believe. I have held mountains and watched them become gravel, and gravel become the mud these creatures pat into caves, and I could not tell you which grain was in a hurry.
The foot-tapper has already gone.
I have already forgotten which one it was.