The Dragon in the Cliff

by Sheila Cole

  She was right. The discovery of the crocodile head did give an enormous boost to my curiosity trade. The news of my find spread from our quarter of town to the marketplace and from there up Broad Street and through the town to the visitors who were always looking for something to amuse themselves. They thronged into our little shop so that I barely had room to move or time to work on preparing my finds. “You should charge them a halfpenny to take a look,” one of the coachmen who drove through Lyme advised. “That’s what they do in London. They’ve this place there where you can see all sort of things, and they charge a halfpenny to go in. This here dragon head you have here is better’n anything they have there. Let people pay for a look, and in no time you shall have some real money.”

  But I could not bring myself to ask for even as little as a halfpenny to see the crocodile’s head. I liked the visitors and gawkers, and I loved their admiration. “It was a lass who found it. Just turned thirteen,” I heard one woman say, and I puffed up with pride.

  Besides, those who came to look often stopped to buy the smaller curiosities I had for sale. In fact, I could barely keep up with the demand for curiosities, although I was becoming more successful than I had been in finding them. Suddenly everyone was interested in them. Usually the visitors began by thinking they could find curiosities themselves, and they went to the beach with geological hammers and chisels, bought from Mr. Adams’s blacksmith shop. But when they found curiosity hunting more difficult than they expected, they came to buy mine. And for the first time since Papa’s death we did not have to count every penny to see if we had enough to pay for bread. We even had enough to ask Mr. Adams to make some heavy chisels and hammers to replace the ones I lost.

  The one person who did not come to see the crocodile head that busy summer of 1812 was the one person I most wanted to come: Squire Henley. I sent a message to Colway Manor that I had found the head of a crocodile and was saving it for him. But I received no reply. A day or two later, I learned from one of the manor’s gardeners that the master was away.

  I was disappointed of course, but I told myself it was all for the best, and allowed myself to hope that I would succeed in finding the body of the fossil before the squire’s return and then have the entire creature for him.

  I thought about finding the body all the time. It stood to reason that it was not far from where I found the head. But “not far” covered a lot of ground. The body could be in the sixty-five-foot-high cliffs that rise from the beach, under the beach, or even farther out, underwater. It would take a lifetime or more to search all of those places thoroughly.

  I will not bother to write about all the false hopes and heartbreaks of my search. Like all quests, mine had its full measure of failure. But in the end, what I remember is the success. It was because of an accident that I saw something that was right in front of me that I had not been seeing before. Seeing this led me to see something else that I hadn’t noticed before, and once I had realized this, I knew where to look for the rest of the crocodile.

  To stretch the time I had for collecting, I was in the habit of going to the beach just as the tide started out. To keep from being swamped, I ran along the base of the cliffs from one high point to the next in the pauses between the waves, arriving at my destination wet from the spray but in time to start looking just as the water was receding.

  One day I misjudged a wave, and it swept me off my feet. I paddled as best I could in my clogs and heavy skirt while holding on to my bag of tools, trying to regain my footing. Another wave came, knocking me down, filling my mouth and nose with water, and dragging me so that I lost my clogs. My arms, stomach, and legs were scratched and bruised. I was certain that I was drowning. But only seconds later, the crest of the wave passed me by, leaving me behind in calmer water. As I struggled to stand, another wave swept me toward the cliffs, gently depositing me at their base, my tool bag clutched in my hand.

  Stunned and gasping, I watched the wave that had carried me in rushing back out to sea, stirring up the gravel as it went. Then I looked round for my clogs. I spotted them a little way off, sticking out of the gravel. I pulled them out. Then I began to wonder where had all this gravel come from? The beach is usually covered with large pebbles, not gravel. Where were the pebbles? Could they have been washed away by the tide?

  With my clogs back on my feet, I hastened along the beach to some high ground. As I waited for the tide to recede a little more, I watched the waves come in to shore and pull back again. I realized that the pebbles were too big to be washed away. More likely they were lying buried beneath the gravel. And if they were beneath the gravel, what else might the gravel be covering?

  As soon as the tide was out far enough for me to get down the beach, I made my way there and began digging. I had no spade or shovel and could only dig with my bare hands. I dug until the hole I made was as long as my arm and still I had not reached the pebbles. But I knew that they had to be there. I returned the next day with a shovel and pickax. I dug a trench along the base of the cliff where I found the head and then proceeded to enlarge it. I dug for several feet before I reached the layer of pebbles. I threw the shovel aside and, jumping into the hole I had made, started to cast the pebbles aside. Below a shallow layer of pebbles, no more than two feet deep, I came to the Lias, the same Lias as the cliffs. I continued enlarging the area that I uncovered, but found nothing before the trench I was in began to fill with water.

  I found the body at the end of the third day of digging. Before I had a chance to do more than uncover a few vertebrae, the tide began to move back in and I had to stop work. No matter, I thought, the beast would not move before I returned for it.

  Mama and I celebrated that evening with a dinner of sausages, potatoes, and ale. “Can you imagine the look on the squire’s face when he hears of this?” Mama asked as she put the sausages in the pan. “He probably never thought it would be found. What do you think he’ll pay for it?”

  “Thirty pounds, maybe forty,” I guessed, naming what seemed like fantastic sums.

  “Something handsome, I suppose,” Mama continued, hardly hearing my answer. “We will put it aside to pay Hale when Joseph’s term is finished. Then we won’t have to worry about that anymore. Won’t that be nice?”

  “We might have some left over,” I joined in, “then we shall have meat on Sunday. Not every Sunday mind you, but special Sundays. We might even have enough to buy bacon every so often, or better yet, sticky buns. I love sticky buns.” I went on making plans as I inhaled the aroma of frying sausages.

  We were soon brought back to reality. The next morning when I went to Mr. Littlejohn’s to see if I might borrow his tools for the job, he predicted that I would never get the body of the fossil out. “The tide will go out, you’ll work like a slave and uncover a bit, then the tide’ll be right back in, covering it up again. If you insist on trying, you’re welcome to them, but they’ll do you no good against the power of the tide.”

  I thought that he was only talking that way because he was a sour old man, jealous of our good fortune. But in the days that followed I discovered how right he was. Neither my strength nor Joseph’s was a match for the tide. We borrowed from the sum set aside to pay the house tax to hire a laborer from a nearby farm, but even with his help we could not uncover enough of the body to get it out before the incoming tide undid our work.

  It was in late October, almost a year from the time I first discovered the crocodile head, and I was walking on the beach one afternoon after a storm. I slipped and with my arms flailing the air as I tried to recover my footing, I realized that I was walking on pebbles, not gravel. The heavy blanket of gravel covering the pebbles had been washed away by the autumn tides and currents.

  Trying to hold back my excitement, I made my way as quickly as I could to the place where I left the crocodile’s body. I dug down through the thin layer of pebbles until I came to the Lias. The vertebrae and ribs were still there, lying embedded in the Lias. Now with the beach lower than it ha
d been during the summer, getting the body out seemed possible. All I needed was help.

  Joseph suggested that we hire workmen from the quarry to get the body out of the rock. They would know all there was to know about cutting rock, and they would have the proper tools. Once again we borrowed from the money set aside to pay the house tax.

  Mama was afraid, after all the disappointments, that we would not succeed in getting the body out of the rock, and that we would be left short when it was time to pay the taxes on the cottage. She fussed a great deal as I set off for the quarry, giving me all sorts of advice. “Offer them a half crown for the job. We might go as high as a crown, but we’ll offer one-half to start with and see how far we can get. Pay the head man a shilling to begin work, and pay him the remainder when they get the curiosity out of the rock, and not before.”

  The first person I saw at the quarry was a boy about my age who was sitting on the ground outside a small windowless lean-to, peeling the bark from a stick with a penknife. “I’d like to speak to the man in charge here,” I told him. The boy continued cutting at the bark. “I’ve a job for him and some of the workmen,” I said, trying to sound as if I hired workmen every day. Still the boy did not respond.

  I saw a group of men working some way off near a stack of limestone slabs, and I approached them. A man, who was covered from head to toe in a fine, white dust, detached himself from the group and slowly made his way over to me. “What is it you want, lass?” he asked.

  “I’ve a job for some men,” I told him.

  “And what kind of a job would a young ’un like you have?” he asked.

  I told him that I needed his help getting something out of the Lias on the beach, deciding not to confuse him with talk of dragons or crocodiles.

  “The beach is a dangerous place to work,” he said, taking his cap off to reveal his dark, unpowdered hair.

  I told him that I worked there, hoping to raise his pride.

  “That you are willing to put yourself in danger is none of my affair,” he said, turning back to the limestone. But he only took a few steps before he stopped and asked, “What is it you want us to cut out of the rock?”

  “A curiosity,” I said, adding that I was in the business of selling them.

  He laughed at this, a big, hearty laugh, as if it was the most amusing thing he’d ever heard.

  I could feel myself growing warm, and I drew myself up and said, “I am willing to pay for your help, sir.” At the mention of pay he stopped laughing. “How much?”

  When I told him I would pay a half crown, he shook his head, “Now how does a lass like you have a half crown?” he asked.

  I stated my terms: one shilling to begin with and the rest when the curiosity was out of the rock. I took the coin out of my pocket to show him that I was in earnest.

  “A half crown may not be enough,” he said. “It depends on how many workmen you’ll need and for how long.”

  I said that I would need four men for two days, three days at the most.

  “Four men for two or three days will cost you more than a half crown,” he replied. After much back and forth he agreed that for four shillings I might purchase the labor of four men with their tools.

  The appointed day arrived. It was clear, with a pale, cloudless sky. I led the four men who were waiting for me at the foot of the Church Cliff path to the place where the crocodile lay. With much bantering and joking about the “treasure” that they were going to unearth for the lass, they set to work moving the pebbles aside. With four of them it did not take long to uncover the body. No sooner did they discover that my treasure really existed than their manner changed. “Did you ever see such a beast?” the headman asked.

  The others only shook their heads in amazement at its size.

  I did not want it taken out of the rock that immediately surrounded it because I was afraid it would crumble. I advised them that the skeleton was stuck in the Lias like a boiled fish’s skeleton lying in its own jelly. “You have to cut it away from the platter. Cut behind it deep enough so you don’t disturb it,” I said.

  “It’s too big. It will crumble just from its own weight,” the headman protested.

  I suggested that we carve it out in sections, marking off each cut.

  “Well, let’s go to it,” the headman commanded. “The lass knows her business. Now it’s our turn to show her we know ours.”

  First they built a barrier out of pilings to keep the pebbles from being washed back by the tide. Then they set to work cutting the fossil out of the Lias. The ring of their chisels and hammers on the Lias was deafening.

  The weather held for the first two days, but on the third day when we were almost finished, the sky was ominous. It was absolutely black by the time we had struggled up the cliff with a slab of rock containing ribs and vertebrae four feet long, weighing several hundred pounds. A small crowd of eager onlookers was waiting for us when we returned to the beach for the second section. They helped us roll the second piece of the body onto the litter. The first drops of rain were falling as we carried the litter up the cliff. By the time we returned to the beach for the tail section, the rain was coming down steadily, but no one seemed to mind. When the quarrymen hoisted the tail onto the litter there was a loud cheer from the onlookers.

  The workmen carrying the litter were followed by a procession of onlookers as they made their way up the cliff from the beach. And what a procession it was! Undaunted by the rain, everyone from sailors who had just landed at the Cobb, to fishermen, artisans, workingmen, apprentices, and schoolboys joined the parade that wound past the churchyard of St. Michael’s, past the old half-timbered houses on Church Street onto Bridge Street to our little cottage, gaily chanting:

  The crocodile!

  The crocodile is a mighty beast,

  That lives in summer climes.

  One got lost,

  And covered with frost,

  Found its way to Lyme.

  I had cleared the workshop in preparation for the crocodile’s body, but even so there was not enough room in the shop to lay the pieces end to end. Including the head, the crocodile measured almost seventeen feet. It was by far the largest fossil anyone had ever seen.

  NEW PLACES, UNCOMFORTABLE THOUGHTS

  Rereading what I have written thus far, I can see that, once Papa set me on my course, my life before the discovery of the crocodile seems straightforward enough. Of course there were difficulties, but they were difficulties that might be expected. It was after I found the crocodile that my life took some unexpected turns and my path became tangled.

  A notice of the discovery of the fossil crocodile was printed in the Sherborne Mercury on November 9, 1812. After it ran the collectors started to appear in the shop. Among those who came, the person who has influenced me the most is Miss Elizabeth Philpot. She and her sister Margaret Philpot are said to have one of the best collections of curiosities in all of England. I had met the Philpot sisters in Papa’s shop and seen them on the beach, but I hadn’t talked to either of them before this.

  Hearing about the giant fossil I found, Miss Elizabeth came to the shop to see it for herself. After examining it carefully, she offered me fifty pounds for it.

  It seemed an enormous sum. The blood rushed into my ears and my heart was pounding as I was caught between the desire to say yes, and the knowledge that I could not.

  “You’ve another offer,” she guessed when I did not reply at once.

  “Not exactly,” I stammered. “Squire Henley asked me to promise to save my interesting fossils for him. But I didn’t …”

  “Still, he is your landlord and it would not do to sell it out from under him,” she said, understanding my position at once. “There is nothing you can do but wait to see if he is interested. But if he is not, my offer still stands. In the meantime we can study the fossil. With your permission I will do some sketches of it.”

  Miss Elizabeth came to the shop the very next day carrying a folding stool, pad, pen, ink, and penc
ils. I watched with fascination as the long, triangular tooth-filled snout, the bony eye with its flower-petallike plates, and the rows of tangled ribs took shape on the paper under her skilled hand. She encouraged me to try sketching it myself. “Keep your eye on the object you are drawing, Mary, not on the paper, but on the fossil itself. That is how the hand learns to copy what the eye sees. Oh now, that is more like it,” she said, instructing me. I am grateful to her for the modest skill at drawing fossils that I acquired with her help. It has proved to be very useful to me.

  She did several sketches, each from a different angle. While we were sketching, we talked. “Do you think creatures like this are alive now? Not in England, of course, but somewhere else, perhaps?” I asked her.

  She looked at me with surprise. “Do you mean to say that you don’t think it is a crocodile?”

  “I don’t know. I have never seen a crocodile,” I confessed. “Would a crocodile have legs? This creature doesn’t have any.”

  “Yes, it would, but then I am not the one to ask because I have never seen a crocodile either, only an etching of one,” she said, and for some reason we both laughed.

  “Do you think it really is a crocodile? Might it be some new creature, one that hasn’t been discovered yet?” I asked.

  “It may be. That is why I would like to see it made available to comparative anatomists for study.”

  I didn’t know what a comparative anatomist was, and I was too embarrassed to ask. With her keen perception Miss Elizabeth guessed this. “Comparative anatomists are scientists who compare the form of the body of different animals to each other and to fossils to see how they are alike and how they differ. It is the only way we can tell if the creatures we find in fossil form are like those that are living now and how they might be related to one another.”

  I do not know if it was her admission that she had never seen a crocodile or the easy way she talked to me that made me bold enough to ask a question I had been struggling with myself, but was afraid to ask anyone else, “What if it is not like any living animal? What would that mean?”