Dazed and disoriented, Daba landed heavily and sank into something pulpy. She paddled her legs as hard as she could in a desperate bid to escape the ooze, but she couldn’t move at all in the sticky substance. Thankfully, the floodwaters were still pouring down, thinning the slurry and tumbling everything around, so when things finally began to settle, she was able to float to the top. She had another go at walking. The sludge beneath her was soft and watery, but solid chunks of varying sizes and shapes bobbed along on the surface, making it possible for her to crawl from one to the other. She made slow progress, the slime sucking at her feet, but at last she reached the edge of the slurry pit.
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.
Her words sent a jolt of realisation through Daba. She stared at the ant, a soldier ant with a pair of venomous mandibles. ‘You twit, you can cause another flood!’ Daba shouted.
The soldier ant stared at the expedition leader in bewilderment.
‘Bite it! Make it throw up!’
The soldier ant, grasping the idea at last, immediately started nipping savagely at the stomach wall. She quickly chewed through several cilia, leaving deep gouges in the wall. The stomach wall quivered violently, then began to convulse and contort. The cilia forest grew denser, a clear sign that the stomach was contracting and the dinosaur was about to vomit. The digestive sea began to roil, taking the ants with it. Engulfed by the rapidly rising sea, in a very short space of time the five ants were whooshed all the way up the oesophagus, swept over the isthmus of the tongue, catapulted across the two rows of teeth and expelled into the great outdoors, landing in the grass with a flump.
Once the five expeditioners had disengaged themselves from the slithery slick of vomit, they saw that they were encircled by a vast swarm of ants. A crowd of several hundred thousand had come to cheer the return of the great explorers. The Age of Exploration of the Dinosaur Body had begun in earnest, an era that was to prove as important to antkind as the Age of Discovery was for humankind.
3
The Dawn of Civilisation
Following Daba’s pioneering feat, one ant expedition after another plumbed the depths of the dinosaur body via the oesophagus. They discovered that the fastest way in was to hitch a ride when the dinosaur was eating or drinking something, surfing in on a gulp of river water or a ball of chewed-up food. The ants knew that a dinosaur was made up of at least two systems: the digestive system, which they had now probed many times, and the respiratory system, which they had never visited. After Daba recovered from her injuries, the five-legged, stumpy-feelered ant decided to try the windpipe again. This time her team was consisted of smaller ants and they marched at widely spaced intervals to minimise the irritation to the dinosaur’s respiratory tract and prevent a repeat of the disastrous cough.
Compared with the oesophagus, the journey through the respiratory tract was gruelling: there was no food or water on which to cadge a lift, and they had to march in gale-force conditions. Only the strongest ants stood a chance of making it. But the great explorer and her team triumphed again and for the first time antkind entered a dinosaur’s respiratory system.
Where the digestive system was suffocatingly humid, the respiratory system was a domain of fierce winds and unpredictable currents. In the dinosaur’s lungs, the ants witnessed the awe-inducing sight of air dissolving into the bloodstream via the vast three-dimensional labyrinth formed by the air sacs. That river of blood, flowing from some unknown source, alerted them to the existence of other worlds inside the dinosaurs, worlds that they would much later come to identify as the circulatory system, the nervous system and the endocrine system.
The focus of the third stage of exploration was the dinosaurs’ craniums. On their first attempt, the ants ventured in through their subject’s nostrils. Light-footed though they were, their pattering caused such intense tickling that the dinosaur sneezed with tornadic ferocity, shooting the little prospectors back out of its nasal passageway like bullets from a gun. Most of the team members on that initial mission were torn to shreds. Later cranial survey expeditions entered through the ears, with more success. En route, they investigated the dinosaurs’ visual and auditory organs and analysed those delicate systems. They did eventually manage to reach the brain, though it was many years before they worked out the purpose and significance of that most mysterious of organs.
And so it was that the ants gained a detailed understanding of dinosaur anatomy, laying the foundations for the medical revolution that followed.
Ant expeditions often entered the bodies of sick dinosaurs – massive creatures that had been reduced to skin and bone, their eyes dull and heavy, their movements slow and feeble, creatures that could do little but continually moan with pain. By comparing their interior systems with those of healthy dinosaurs, the ant explorers were easily able to pinpoint the locations of the diseased organ or lesion in question. They envisioned many different methods of treating internal diseases in dinosaurs, but not a single one could be put to the test, for such mammoth undertakings would require the consent of the dinosaur itself and to date the ants had always gained access without their hosts’ knowledge.