It was one of those special Sundays where the men fixed an afterchurch breakfast.

Then I got to the beasts — the foumart, the cur fox, the baboon, the Chillingham bull — and suddenly, gazing at a handsome illustration of a lion, I remembered, as a child, pulling down an impossibly heavy old leatherbound book of fables, full of magical drawings of wolves and crows and bears, intense in their detail while managing to leave much to the imagination.

If the universe were packed solid with neutrons, say, so there was no empty space anywhere, there would still only be about 10¹²⁸ particles in it, quite a bit more than a googol but trivially small compared to a googolplex.

Seep sediments had higher densities of ampharetid, dorvilleid, hesionid, cirratulid and lacydoniid polychaetes, whereas carbonates had more gastropods, as well as syllid, chrysopetalid and polynoid polychaetes.