"We shall be with you ere sundown," said Girej.
Red Roqir was low in the west, banding the greenish Krishnan sky with scarlet and gold, when the travelers reached the area that Marot had chosen. The paleontologist said:
"Fergus, let me pick the place of our camp. I have done this before." He asked the shaihan-herd in Mikardandou: "Master Herg, how high does the Zora rise during floods?"
"Let me think," said the Krishnan. "In the third year of Dasht Kavir, it came to the top of yonder ridge." He pointed. "That's the highest whereof I've heard."
Marot walked his aya to the ridge and cast a sharp eye along an imaginary contour line. "Wait here!" he called, and spurred his mount to a trot. Back and forth he went, and up and down the shores of the river. A quarter-hour later, as the sun touched the horizon, he returned.
"I have a suitable place," he said. "Follow me, please."
Reith thought that the paleontologist had shrewdly picked a site safely above high-water mark but still within easy walking distance of the river. The earth was mostly bare, a reddish clay formed by the disintegration of shale, and littered with sandstone pebbles and an occasional boulder. It sloped down in a long, easy incline to the river on either side, and from the top of the slope rolled gently off into the distance. Away from the river, plants grew more thickly. Many were spiky or thorny multi-colored herbs and bushes, with stretches of bare red soil between.
There was no sign of Doukh or Girej. Reith shouted for them, but only silence answered. As Roqir slipped below the skyline, Krishnan night life began its endless symphony of chirps, squeaks, and buzzes.
"It looks as if we'll have to put up our tent ourselves," said Reith.
"Need ye a hand?" said Herg. "Thanks," said Reith.
When the tent was up, the Krishnan said: "I maun be off to Kubyab. The chief will send a man down to see how ye fare betimes."
"Good-night," said Reith, then to Marot: "Those two so-called workers aren't here yet."
Marot shrugged. "Perhaps they got lost, or changed their minds, or met with an accident."
"Maybe I ought to go back along the trail to look for them."
"Do not think of it, I beg you! Casting about in strange country in the dark would merely get you lost, also."
Reith was not unhappy to let himself be argued out of a nocturnal search, although his overdeveloped sense of responsibility nipped him. He and Marot cooked a simple meal.
Reith poked his head out of the tent the next morning and saw a family of slender-legged Krishnan herbivores drinking on the far side of the river. When he opened the flaps and emerged, the creatures looked up, snorted, and bounded away up the bank.
Later, Reith set out on the sorrel aya to cast back along the trail for signs of the camp workers. He moved slowly, staring about to fix in his mind the contours of the land, and halted now and then to consult Marot's map. It was easy to get lost in this roadless, rolling country with few obvious landmarks. He passed a herd of Sainian's shaihans, massive pied brown-and-white beasts, munching away at the scanty vegetation. The animals stared dully at him and resumed their repast.
An hour later, Reith came upon Girej and Doukh, sprawled on the turf with an empty bottle beside them. Their aya was tethered nearby. Reith dismounted and, holding his reins, stood over the recumbent forms. Both breathed; Girej even snored. Reith nudged the huge Doukh with the toe of his boot. The Krishnan awoke, looked up, and grinned sheepishly.
"What in Hishkak are you doing here?" barked Reith. "We expected you at the camp last night."
"Well, sir," grumbled Doukh. " 'Twas this way. After we'd walked for an hour, we stopped to rest our feet. And old Girej had a bottle to strengthen us for the rest of the journey. I drank but a few swallows; but the miching losel finished it off ere I could stop him. Then there was no getting him to's feet to travel on."
"Why didn't you come on yourself, with the aya?"
"Why, sir! Think ye I'd leave a comrade lying insensible drunk in the wild, where a kargán or a yeki could come upon and devour him? What sort of rudesby think ye I be?"
"Well, get him up now," growled Reith. "He's had time enough to sleep it off. This'll cost you two each half a day's pay."
At length Reith and the workers straggled in to camp, Doukh leading the pack aya and Girej mumbling: "Oh, my poor head!"
Marot came running up, puffing. "Fergus! I think that I have found a promising bed!"
Reith dismounted, handed his reins to Girej, and gave the two Krishnans their orders. He said to Marot: "Show it to me, old boy!"
Scientist and guide walked a hundred meters upstream. Pointing with his geologist's hammer, Marot said: "This patch of gravel is the mouth of a former stream bed. Under the pebbles is Z—I mean Kharobian sandstone. Luckily it is soft near the surface. These pebbles have been carried down from fossil-bearing beds higher up. I know because they include many fossil fragments." Marot bent and picked up an apparent pebble. "See!" he said. "It is a fragment from the dorsal spine of a piscoid, which on Terra we should call a fish. It is not of course related to our fishes, but has evolved along parallel lines. Here is another."
Marot showed a second pebble to Reith, glanced at the two specimens through his magnifying glass, and tossed them away.
"Aren't you going to save those?" asked Reith.
"No. I can collect a basketful any time. Since they are not in situ and are not connected with the rest of the skeleton, they would tell me nothing that I do not already know. But they point the way to possible significant discoveries."
For the next hour they wandered back and forth about the area. Marot found several small fossils: a curved, reptilian-looking fang three centimeters long; an unidentified vertebra; and a teardrop-shaped stone which, he explained, was a coprolite—the fossilized turd of some bygone aquatic creature.
Reith was roaming over a patch of red sandstone more or less free from its overlay of pebbles when, in a little depression, he noticed a streak of pale gray amid the brownish red of the rock. Looking closer, he saw that this material had a certain regularity, like that of a string of beads.
"Aristide!" he called. "Would you look at this? I don't suppose it's anything at all, but you might ..."
Marot approached. "Hein!" he said. "I assure you, my friend, it certainly is something. It is a vertebral column. Here is a vertebra that has become detached from the matrix." He picked up what to Reith looked like an ordinary dark-brown stone. "Let us look further."
Marot squatted over the streak and, with a whiskbroom, began cleaning the coating of dust from the disintegrated sandstone of the surface.
"Ha!" said the paleontologist. "This is a rib. And here is another." As further streaks came into view, Marot poked at the crumbling surface with a dull old sheath knife, swept away the loose fragments, and poked some more.
"This is remarkable luck," he said. "We might have spent a moon poking about without finding a thing."
"What can I do to help?" said Reith, keeping his excitement under control.
"Oh, go walk around here and bring me anything that looks like a fossil."
Marot laid out the tools of his trade: a geologist's hammer, with one sharp and one squared-off end; a whiskbroom; a blunt knife; and a small pick, about half the weight of a normal pick, with an eighty-centimeter handle.
"What do you call that little pick?" asked Reith.
"That is a Marsh pick," said the scientist.
Reith frowned. "Seems like a funny kind of tool for dredging a swamp."
"No; it is not that kind of marsh—un marais. This pick is named for the great American paleontologist, Othniel Charles Marsh, who designed it three hundred years ago. In the nineteenth century, he it was who furnished the convincing fossil proof of the organic evolution of all organisms.