Free Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson

was firm, he attached the rope to the D-ring in the middle of the gear, and quickly pulled himself back up the cliff. Then he lay down flaton his stomach, and began to haul up his dog, until he could grab it by the scruff of the neck. And help it scrabble over the edge.
    They were both panting and exhausted and the man had forgotten water.
    He rolled over onto his back, watching the clouds speeding over the sky, and fingering the seahorse in his pocket. He would send it to the Archaeological Society, and tell them about his find. But as he made this plan, he realised that he wanted to keep the seahorse. More than anything, he wanted to keep it, and so to the great surprise of his dog he let himself down the rope again, and gouged out another piece of eloquent rock. They were like the tablets of stone given to Moses in the desert. They were God’s history and the world’s. They were his inviolable law; the creation of the world, saved in stone.
    When he got home he felt better, lighter, and he enjoyed his dinner with the Bishop, and later, in his study, he wrapped up the second fossil and sent it by the stable boy to the Archaeological Society. He tied a cardboard parcel label to it, with the date and place of the find.
    Salts had never known anything like it. Within two weeks, scores of palaeontologists were boarding at TheRock and Pit, spilling over into the spare rooms of spinster aunts, sleeping makeshift on camp beds at the Manse, and drawing lots for a bad night in a tent on the cliff edge.
    Darwin himself came to examine the cave. He admitted to being embarrassed by the lack of fossil evidence to support some of his theories. Opponents of his Origin of Species wanted to know why some species seemed not to have evolved at all. Where was the so-called ‘fossil-ladder’?
    ‘The Cambrian era is very unsatisfactory,’ he told his colleagues.
    The cave seemed to suggest all kinds of new possibilities. It was stocked like a larder with trilobites, ammonites, wavy-shelled oysters, brachiopods, brittle stars on long stalks, and although it seemed that all of these things could only have been deposited there by some terrible flood of the Noah-kind, the man with the seahorse in his pocket was unhappy.
    He spent a lot of time listening to the excited voices talking about the beginning of the world. He had always believed in a stable-state system, made by God, and left alone afterwards. That things might be endlessly moving and shifting was not his wish. He didn’t want a broken world. He wanted somethingsplendid and glorious and constant.
    Darwin tried to console him. ‘It is not less wonderful or beautiful or grand, this world you blame on me. Only, it is less comfortable.’
    Dark shrugged. Why would God make a world so imperfect that it must be continually righting itself?
    It made him feel seasick. He made himself feel seasick, listing violently from one side to another, knowing that the fight in him was all about keeping control, when his hands were bloodless with gripping so tight.
    If the movement in him was like the movement in the world, then how would he ever steady himself? There had to be a stable point somewhere. He had always clung to the unchanging nature of God, and the solid reliability of God’s creation. Now he was faced with a maverick God who had made a world for the fun of seeing how it might develop. Had he made Man in the same way?
    Perhaps there was no God at all. He laughed out loud. Perhaps, as he had always suspected, he felt lonely because he was alone.
    He remembered his fingers in the hollow spirals of the fossils. He remembered his fingers in her body. No, he must not remember that, not ever. He clenched his fists.
    God or no God, there seemed to be nothing to hold onto.
    He felt the seahorse in his pocket.
    He got it out, turned it over and over. He thought of the poor male seahorse carrying his babies in his pouch before the rising water had fastened him to the rock forever.
    Fastened to