The tiny element of matter which concerns us has, like everything else, existed since the Big Bang, as it is known; however, the point in time when this drop of gasoline existed in its highest degree of concentration, when it entered into its most refined structure, was here on this planet fifty-five million years ago, during the early Eocene when its constituents still formed the rapidly beating heart of a small prehistoric horse. After combusting on the 23rd of June, 1975, the drop acquired its most unstructured state in the form of exhaust fumes, yet managed nevertheless in this state, twenty-four hours later, to bring about a structure both complex and chaotic: cancer. I know this because I was eavesdropping from the neighboring balcony as she inhaled the particles which triggered the pathological cell division. However, we are getting ahead of ourselves now; let us begin with the prehistoric horse.

At the end of a long hot day mist was rising from the surface of the lake. Their little herd had moved down to the shore and our horse, the one with the heart in question, a five-year-old mare, could feel her fear of crocodiles constricting her throat. She wedged herself in between two of the other horses and stuck her muzzle out across the fragmented mirror surface: she secured her footing and drank, with a sigh, at last.
The animal was a mammal of Perissodactyla order, the Equidae family, best known by the name of Eohippus, the dawn horse, as it was named by Othniel C. Marsh in 1876; however, as Richard Owen had already in 1841 names a certain fossil Huracotheriu, the rules of taxonomy dictated why past tense here? that this term was the correct one. Owen had missed the link with the domestic horse and believed that the animal was related to the shrewmouse, the Latin name for which is Hyrax. Common aesthetic sense has since ensured that this name, both prettier and more appropriate, is most frequently used, usually listed first, or if not, then following in brackets. Eohippus is often compared to a fox terrier, partly because they are a similar size, but also because the point of this breed was to create a dog in the image of a horse. During a hunt the terrier sits on the saddle and it was again why is this past not present tense? considered tasteful if the rider/dog owner had a small simulacrum of his own horse that could continue the hunt underground. At dog shows it was therefore regarded as a plus if a dog's coat had markings in the shape of a saddle.
Our five-year-old mare in the early Eocene, whose coat was a speckled gray brown, felt a sudden surge of anxiety as the image of a Diatryma, a bird of prey almost seven feet in height without any wings to speak of, but consequently with far bigger thighs, claws, and beak, surfaced in her mind. She raised her head and noticed in the reflection of the water how the hairs on her muzzle quivered, made static by the electricity in the air.
"What?" she wondered.
Convection wind caused the day's evaporation to rise until it was halred by the chill from the outer atmosphere and condensed into cumulonimbus clouds. The turbulence within the clouds shattered rain, hail, and ice, producing smaller, electrically charged particles. The disparity in voltage between the surface of the earth and the clouds rapidly approached the number of millions of volts per cubic meter that would trigger a spark. The hairs on our Eohippus's little body stood on end as she sensed the electicity in the air. In an instant a bolt of lightning shot its plasma cord deep into the forest, barely three hundred feet away from the horses, and the resulting crash of thunder was so loud that the horses were temporarily stuck deaf. The sudden silence in their heads contributed to their panic. Billions of synapses flashed in the horses' brains as their autonomous nervous system took control of their bodies and triggered an automatic fright-flee flee *not* fright-free response. The direction of flight was initially the diametrically opposite direction to the light and the sound.
The horse's heart instantly obeyed the command from the sympathetic nervous system: noradrenaline in generous quantities stimulated the sinus node in order to increase the frequency of impulses that ran down through the atrioventricular node, then separated at the bunlde of His ? into the right and left branches and caused, with appropriate delays in the right places, the Purkinje fibers to demand an ever-increasing working rate from the heart. The alternation contractions and relaxations of the heart muscles alloed blood in regulated quantities to flow into the right atrium, onward to the right ventricle ad from there out into the lungs, where it released carbon dioxide and absorbed oxygen; thereafter the blood flowed to the left atrium of the heart, down into the left ventricle and through the aorta out into the body. The heart's rhythm accelerated; its muscles and the brain demanding fresh blood.
The horses ran along the lakeshore, but soon darted into the undergrowth of the forest, where the darkness was even denser now the clouds had compressed. Underneath her somewhat rasping breathing the mare could hear her blood pump through her ears.
Rain followed shortly afterward, first as light showers, which they hardly noticed, growing heavier and then a sudden cloudburst. Gusts of wind swept curtains of heavy drops across the treetops and the surface of the lake, The horses continued their flight through the storm, until and element of indecision began to characterized their movements. Our mare chose the wrong path around a fallen tree and was lagging behind the herd; she could see the two horses in front of her jump over a swelling brook whereas the third one had halted. She hesitated; disoriented she was able neither to stop nor jump and consequently fell into the muddy water with a splash. For a while she fought to keep her head above water, but the current got hold of her and dragged her downward. Then she banged her head against a rock and lost consciousness.

It would appear to be the shimmering sunlight creeping in under the rim of her eyelids which made the mare wake up, and not the crow sitting on her thigh pecking at a wound. Our mare, who was dazed but alive, jerked to scaare the bird away, butexperienced in the very same second a thratening loss of balance as a void opened up beneath her. It was not until now that she realized where she was: on a tangled mass of roots proturding from a steep slope that fell away down toward the lake a terrifying distance below her. A huge tree stooped over the slop and its vouminous network of roots, partly revealed by the rain, had broken her fall toward a certain death in the lake. It was an ancient maple, almost a hundred feet tall, whose roots stuck out thirty feet into the air. The horse gingerly shifted her weight to a more secure footing, stood up and checked herself: there was a gash on her thigh, she was generally bruised and a sharp pain throbbed in her temple, but no broken bones it would seem. She made it up the tangled roots toward the edge of the slope on hesitant legs, but the last bit necessitate a small jump, which she prepared for but ultimately did not dare attempt.
"Wait until tomorrow," she thought and stretched her neck out for some leaves. She was not short of drinking water either as the brook, now reduced to s small stream, cascaded from the slope and flowed through the roots down into the lake while making a constant trickling sound. Having quenched her thirst and eaten most of what she could reach, she found a broad root to settle down on.
"This is safe," she thought. "Crocodile cannot reach up. Diatryma cannot reach down."
The sun set and the moon rose. For a long time the mare lay there looking alternately at the moon and its reflection in the surface of the water. Finally she decided that the moon must have a sister who lived in the laked. She whinnied contently at this explanation, fell asleep and dreamed that she was watching dust particles dance in a beam of sunlight. A column of ants marched past her on the forest floor. Suddenly, with incredible spped, the whiskers oon her muzzle grew into long, heavy, quivering rods that bashed into tree trunks and branches whenever she tried to moved. Every time a whisker hit something a shrill note rang out in her skull. This quickly escalated into a cacophony that was approaching her pain threshold...which was when the dream ended, before the mare had time to surface from her sleep.
This period of sleep gave the animal's organism the chance to concentrate on the healing process which had commenced within seconds of her sustaining her injuries. First the body tried to cleanse its wound of impurities and dead tissue by allowing white blood corpuscles to emigrate from the bloodstream out into the tissue, where . . .
Throughout the night another process persevered: the seepage from the brook and the considerable weight of the maple, together with the mare's small, but nevertheless crucial weight, eroded the slope, which eventually gave way round about midnight. A huge chunk of soil crashed into the lake with a rumble and a splash, and these noises roused the horse out of her sleep, but, before she had time to look around, the tree, with a deep groan, titled 30 degrees whereupon the horse lost her footing and tumbled toward the water, landing first on a small floating island formed from a chunk of the collapsed slope. During the few seconds that passed before the temporary vessel sank, the mare had time to smell the newly upturned soil and watch the tree keel over so it hung diagonally downward. What were formerly the top branches now dangled just beyond her reach. Simultaneously the unstable ground beneath her gave way. Another splash. Wide-eyed she struggled for just under a minute, but then gave up. The mud on the bottom enveloped the little horse almost lovingly. Her final thought concerned the taste of fern shoots.

Death exists, but only in a practical, macroscopic sense. . . . The chain of transformation continues indefinitely; precisely how depends on the actual circumstances and in this instance --our horse at the bottom of the lake-- the change of state occurred anaerobically as mire and mud completely enveloped the animal. A few minutes after the heart had stopped beating, the cytoplasm of the muscle cells solidified to a gel due to the accumulation of lactic acid from the heart's failed attempt to pump without oxygen. The blood, saturated by carbon dioxide, stopped circulating and flowed toward the lowest parts. . . The small body emitted its heat to the mire and was soon in balance with the temperature of its surroundings, approximately 45 degrees Fahrenheit. Various enzymes associated with the decomposition and breakdown functions of living tissue took advantage of their newly found freedom to instigate an internal dissolution of cells until these exploded and released their highly nutritious contents. . . . . . . The bones retained their state for a while, but eventually they too succumbed and began to dissolve.
Layer upon layer of material was deposited at the bottom of the lake as time passed; over millions of years the patient micrometers of sediments became kilometers of strata on top of the heart of the small Eohippus. The pressure from the multiple tonnes of material, the heat from the earth's core, and the general heaving and nudging of the landscape in the form of shifts, folds, and faults eventually broke down the decayed remains of the horse into oil or more precisely, a vast amount of hydrocarbon bonds, variations on the basal structure CxH2x+2.
The lake and the forest had long since disappeared and been replaced by arid mountains intersected by rivers. The slowly forming oil meandered through the surrounding minerals and accumulated in pockets --collectively known as the Green River Formation, once oil in serious quantities was discovered in the area in 1948. The small quantity of oil that had once been the heart of a mare was now located three thousand feet below ground level, eight miles south of the town of Jensen. The area was called the Uinta Basin and belonged to the federal state of Utah in the United States of America.

/p14. az- Machine: Peter Adolphsen,translated fr Danish by Charlotte Barslund