Literature
Excerpt 9: The Waking World
Here the water bubbled out of the rock from deep in the mountain, cascading into calcite pools precipitated from the minerals brought up with the water. It was scalding hot at the top, too hot to stand, but the lower pools were just right. The mineral content, extreme heat, and acidic water may seem like the last place to find life, but each pool held a primordial ooze of organisms: beds of waving eelgrass gave shelter to giant clams, their golden mantles spotted with violet diamonds and feeding off the suspended microscopic algae; iridescent mosquito fish hugged the surface in search of food, spitting insects out of the air with surprising a