“I’ll remember,” Daisy promised cryptically, as she mentally deleted from her article a passing mention of the early bird. Wondering whether Archaeopteryx in its day had breakfasted on worms—she had rather ignored the fossil invertebrates—she went on, “I was just going to the reptile gallery. Will you tell me a bit about the pterodactyls and those sea monsters?”
“Leviathan that crooked serpent, and the dragon that is in the sea,” muttered Sergeant Hamm.
“Superstition!” Mummery’s wild eyebrows quivered in annoyance. “Ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs. Fascinating creatures. I shall be more than happy to assist you, Miss Dalrymple. Allow me,” he added, taking the tripod and camera from her.
He walked as fast as he talked. Daisy trotted at his side through the passage to the fossil reptiles.
Their gallery was half the width of the mammals’. On the left-hand wall hung slabs of stone, each with the skeleton of a prehistoric monster half-embedded. Poor, pathetic things! Mummery started to expound, in detail, upon the painstaking process of extracting a fragile fossil from the matrix where it was found. Daisy began by taking notes, but he went too fast and used too many technical words. Her attention wandered.
The opposite wall was pierced at regular intervals by the rounded arches typical of the museum, narrow alternating with wide. The first was Special Palæontological Collections.Next came the wide entrance to Fossil Plants, Corals, and Sponges—that was where the one-legged Underwood had ended up, wasn’t it? Some of the plants were quite pretty, Daisy recalled, but not interesting enough for her article. The third arch had a closed door with a sign, GEOLOGICAL LIBRARY.
Between the arches stood mounted skeletons, impressive in their way but less spectacular than dinosaurs. She hoped Mr. Mummery would not expect her to photograph them. Regretting having encouraged him, she drifted along after him from display to display.
Another arch divided the long reptile gallery in half. Beyond it were the entrances to the invertebrates and to cephalopods—Whatwere cephalopods?—and then the dinosaurs Daisy was aiming at. As if on guard outside the last, a squat, massive monster some ten feet long lurked on splayed legs. Though armoured with bony back-plates and armed with spikes on its blunt, heavy head, it made Daisy think of a giant bulldog.
Mummery noticed the direction of her glance. “Ah, you are admiring the Pareiasaurus,” he exclaimed, moving toward it. “From South Africa, and one of the finest things in my collection.”
“A fearsome beast,” said Daisy.
“No, no, not at all, a peaceful herbivore.” He leaned across the rope barrier and fondly patted his pet’s hefty haunch, then gestured along its length. “All this is defensive, purely defensive. A splendid chap, isn’t he? A complete skeleton, too. Not a single one of those bones is plaster of Paris.”
A tall, lanky man emerging from the Dinosaur Gallery gave Mummery a sour look, but turned to Daisy.
“Miss Dalrymple? Witt tells me you want to take some photographs? I’m Steadman, the dinosaur curator.”
“Oh yes, thank you. Dr. Smith Woodward said I may photograph the dinosaurs, and I have some questions for you.”
“Dinosaurs are just another branch of Reptilia,” grumbled Mummery.
“Justanother branch,” Steadman protested. “You might as well agree with Pettigrew that fossils are ‘just another branch’ of Mineralogy.”
“Not likely! Why, the rotter thinks they’re utterly worthless.”
“Unless they have usefully metamorphosed into coal or petroleum,” said Steadman dryly. “This is your equipment, is it, Miss Dalrymple?”
Mummery meekly handed over the tripod and camera, his claim to the dinosaurs dissipated in shared dislike of Pettigrew. He glanced wistfully from the camera to his pet Pareiasaurus. “If I can be of any further assistance, Miss Dalrymple,” he sighed, “you will find me in the work room behind the Geological Library. Or if I’m not there, one of my assistants will find me.”
Daisy thanked him, somewhat absently. Libraries and work rooms—she pondered the possibility of expanding on the travel article to describe the scientific work of the museum for the interested layman. One of the weightier magazines might buy it.
Avoiding over-technical information would be easy. All she had to do was leave out anything she didn’t understand. The girls’ boarding school she had attended had been absolutely free of any masculine taint of science. The school motto should have beenIgnorance Is Bliss, but a minimal grounding in the basics might at least have let Daisy understand what Pettigrew, Mummery, and Steadman were arguing about.
3
Mr. Steadman ushered Daisy into the Dinosaur Gallery. Over half its length was taken up by the Diplodocus, eighty-five feet from nose to the whiplash tip of its tail, thirteen feet high, with its tiny head perched at the end of a long, slender neck.
“I’d like to take the Diplodocus,” Daisy said, “but it’s so huge I don’t think I could do it justice. Besides, it’s American, isn’t it?”
“The Iguanodon is home grown,” said Steadman with a smile, smoothing back his thinning hair. “Do you want to try that? It’s smaller, of course, but still quite dramatic.”
About to agree, Daisy heard the gallery’s commissionaire say sharply, “No running,ifyou please!” She looked round to see Derek and Belinda approaching at a sort of compromise between a run and a walk.
Derek skidded to a halt, eyes only for the Diplodocus. “Crikey!” he said, scanning it from end to end. “Crikey! Is it real?”
“Course it is, isn’t it, Aunt Daisy?” Belinda said scornfully. “Everything here is real.”
“You’d better ask Mr. Steadman here,” Daisy advised.“He’s the museum’s dinosaur man. My nephew, Derek, Mr. Steadman, and …” She could hardly introduce Bel to the curator as her future stepdaughter, particularly as he was now looking rather disgruntled. She shouldn’t have troubled him with the children. “And Belinda,” she finished.
“Please, sir, is itreal?”
