Those words defeated me somehow. I took samples as we went, but halfheartedly. All of these tiny remnants I was stuffing into glass tubes with tweezers … what would they tell me? Not much, I felt. Sometimes you get a sense of when the truth of things will not be revealed by microscopes. Soon, too, the sound of the heartbeat through the walls became so loud to me I stopped to put in earplugs to muffle its beat, choosing a moment while the surveyor’s attention lay elsewhere. Be-masked, half-deaf for different reasons, we continued our descent.
