‘Another curious thing about them,’ Theodore continued, happily piling miracle upon miracle, ‘is that at certain times, er … you know, if it is a hot summer or something like that and the pond is liable to dry up, they go down to the bottom and form a sort of hard shell round themselves. It’s a sort of suspended animation, for the pond can dry up for, er … um … let us say seven or eight years, and they will just lie there in the dust. But as soon as the first rain falls and fills the pond, they come to life again.
