I will endeavor not to bore you with a travelogue, for I know from Ogilvey that you are familiar with the village of Whitby, with its quaint red roofs and whitewashed walls, the crumbling abbey ruins at East Cliff, & etc. And I had, by the time, I must confess, taken in more than my share of maritime scenery, and had little interest or patience remaining for anything save the fossil shells and bones, and fossiliferous strata, which I had come so many thousands of miles to see.
After a good night’s sleep, despite a terrible storm toward dawn, I dressed and went down to breakfast, where there was some considerable excitement and discussion among other guests and the proprietor regarding a Russian schooner, Demeter, which had run aground only a few days prior at Tate Hill Pier. As I have said, I was quite beyond caring about ships and scenery at this point, and paid little attention to the conversation, though I do recall that the circumstances of the ship’s grounding were somewhat mysterious and seemed the source of no small degree of anxiety. Regardless, my mind was almost entirely on my work. I finished my eggs and sausages, a pot of strong black coffee, and set off for the museum. The morning air was not especially warm nor cool, and it was an easy walk, during which I hardly noticed my surroundings, lost instead in my thoughts of all things paleontological.
I reached the quayside shortly before eleven o’clock and was met, as planned, by the Reverend Henry Swales, who has acted now for many years in a curatorial capacity, caring for the museum’s growing cabinet. Though established originally as a repository for fossils, in the last several decades the museum’s mission has been significantly expanded to encompass the general natural history of the region, including large assemblages of beetles, botanical materials, lepidoptera, and preserved fishes. Reverend Swales, a tall, good-natured fellow with a thick gray mustache and the eyebrows to match, eagerly directed his Yankee guest to the unpretentious gallery where many wall-mounted saurians and other fossils are kept on display for the public. I listened attentively as he related the stories of each specimen, as a man might relate another man’s biography, the circumstances of their individual discoveries and conservation. I was taken almost at once with a certain large plesiosaur which had preserved within its rib cage the complete skeleton of a smaller plesiosaur, and much of the afternoon was passed studying this remarkable artifact, making my sketches, and losing myself ever deeper in my fancies of a lost, antediluvian world of monstrous sea dragons.
Eventually, the Reverend Swales returned and reminded me that the museum would be closing for the day at four, but I was welcome to stay later if I wished. I did, as I’d only just begun to scratch the surface of this marvelous collection, but didn’t wish to abuse the reverend’s hospitality. After all, I had many more days to pore over these relics, and my eyes were beginning to smart from so many hours scrutinizing the plesiosaurs and ichthyosauria.
“Thank you,” said I. “But that really won’t be necessary. I’ll return early tomorrow morning.” He reminded me that the museum did not open until eight, which I assured him was entirely agreeable. I tidied my notes and left Reverend Swales to lock up for the night.
Leaving the quayside behind, I decided to take a leisurely stroll toward the seaside, as it was still early, the weather was fine, and I’d little else to occupy my time except my books and notes. My route took me north along Pier Road, with the dark brown waters of the narrow River Esk flowing swiftly along on my right-hand side. High above the river, of course, rose East Cliff and the venerable ruins of the old abbey.
Though earlier it had interested me not even in the least, I found myself gazing, fascinated, at the distant, disintegrating walls, the lancet archways, perhaps somewhat more disposed to appreciate “local color” now that some small fraction of my desire to examine Whitby’s famous saurians had been sated by the day’s work. I knew little of the site’s history, only that the original abbey had been erected on the cliffside in A.D. 657, destroyed two centuries later by Viking raiders, and that the ruins of the present structure were the remains of a Norman abbey built on the same spot at some later date. I thought perhaps there had been some saint or another associated with the abbey, that I had read that somewhere, but could not recollect the details. However, as I proceeded along the Pier Road, those towering ruins began to elicit from me strange feelings of dread, which I was, then and now, sir, completely at a loss to explain, and I decided it was best to occupy myself with other, less foreboding sights. So it was that in short order, I came to West Cliff, there above the beach, where the old cobbles of Pier Road turn sharply back to the south again toward the village, forming something like the crooked head of a shepherd’s staff.
I must apologize if I have drifted into the sort of tedious travelogue I earlier promised to avoid, but it is important to impress upon you, at this point in my account, my state of mind, the odd and disquieting effect the abbey had elicited from me. I am not someone accustomed to such emotions and generally regard myself as a man not the least bit dogged by superstition. I told myself that whatever I felt was no more than the cumulative product of light and shadow, compounded by some exhaustion from my long day, and was only what most any other rational man might feel gazing upon those ruins.
At West Cliff, I was at once distracted from my intended goal, the Liassic shales themselves, by the extraordinary sight of a schooner run aground on the eastern side of the quay, across the Esk, and quickly realized that I was, in fact, seeing the very schooner, the Demeter, which I’d heard discussed with such excitement and foreboding over breakfast. I assure you, Dr. Watson, that the dead Russian ship cut a peculiar and lonely spectacle, cast up as she was on the jagged shingle of Tate Hill Pier, at the foot of East Cliff and the old graveyard. Her pathetic, shattered masts and bowsprit at once put me in mind of the tall spines of some pre-Adamite monster, not an odd association, of course, for someone in my profession. The tangled rigging and torn canvas hung loose, sagging like some lifeless mass of rawhide and sinew, flapping in the ocean’s breeze.
And once again, that unaccustomed sense of dread assailed me, though even stronger than it had before, and I admit to you that I considered turning at once back toward the comfort of the inn. However, as I have said, I count my freedom from baser beliefs and superstitions as a particular point of pride, and knowing there was nothing here to fear and determined to have a look at the alum beds, not to be deterred by such childish thoughts or emotions, I began searching for some easy access to the beach below me, where I might better examine the rocks.
Within only a very few minutes I’d located a spiral, wooden stairway affixed to the cliff near the wall of the quay. However, the years and ravages of the sea had done much damage to the structure and it swayed most alarmingly as I carefully descended the slick steps to the sands below. Having finally reached the bottom, I paused briefly and stared back at the rickety stairway, sincerely hoping that I might find an alternate means of reaching the top again. The tide was out, revealing a broad swath of clean sand and the usual bits of flotsam, and I rightly supposed that I still had a good hour or so to look about the foot of West Cliff before setting out to discover such an alternative became a pressing concern.
Almost at once, then, I came across the perfectly preserved test of a rather large example of spiny echinodermata, or sea urchin, weathered all but entirely free of the alum shales which had imprisoned it for so many epochs, and deposited on the sand. I brushed it off and examined it more closely in the sunlight, unable to place either its genus or species, and suspecting that it might perhaps be of a form hitherto unrecognized by paleontologists; I deposited my prize in my right coat pocket and continued to scan the steep rocks for any other such excellent fossils. But, as the evening wore on, I failed to spot anything else quite as interesting, all my additional finds consisting in the main of broken pieces of ammonoid and mussel shells embedded in hard limestone nodules, a few fish bones, and what I hoped might prove to be a small fragment from one of the characteristic hourglass-shaped flipper bones of an ichthyosaur. I glanced out to sea, and then back to the dark gray rocks, trying to envision, as I had so often done before, the unimaginable expanse of time which had transpired since the stones before me were only slime and ooze at the bottom of an earlier and infinitely more alien sea.