Pierre Auguste Renoir By the Seashore

Pierre Auguste Renoir By the SeashoreThomas Kinkade Victorian AutumnThomas Kinkade The Night Before Christmas
After three days in the company of the wheeled creatures, Mary Malone knew rather more about them, and they knew a great deal about her.
That first morning they carried her for an hour or so along the basalt highway to a settlement by a river, and the journey had developed the central spine.
The basalt highway led gradually downward, and after a while the slope increased, so the creatures could freewheel. They tucked their side legs up and steered by leaning to one side or the other, and hurtled along at a speed Mary found terrifying, though she had to admit that the creature she was riding never gave her the slightest feeling of danger. If only she'd had was uncomfortable; she had nothing to hold on to, and the creature's back was hard. They sped along at a pace that frightened her, but the thunder of their wheels on the hard road and the beat of their scudding feet made her exhilarated enough to ignore the discomfort.And in the course of the ride she became more aware of the creatures' physiology. Like the grazers' skeletons, theirs had a diamond-shaped frame, with a limb at each of the comers. Sometime in the distant past, a line of ancestral creatures must have developed this structure and found it worked, just as generations of long-ago crawling things in Mary's world