Two miles below the light, bacteria live without sun, thrive on sulphur in a cave of radioactive rock, and, blind in the night of the ocean floor, molluscs that feed only on wood wait for wrecks. White tubeworms heap in snowdrifts around hydrothermal vents, at home in scalding heat. Lichens encroach on Antarctic valleys where no rain ever fell. There is nowhere life cannot take hold, nowhere so salt, so cold, so acid, but some chancer will be there, flourishing on bare stone, getting by, gleaning a sparse living from marine snow, scavenging light from translucent quartz, as if lack and hardship could do nothing but quicken it, this urge to cling on in the cracks of the world, or as if this world itself, so various, so not to…
