“It was nothing to brag about, just a sort of squishy blob…”

The mysterious squishy blob described above is a character in the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. The blob lives “half a billion years ago”. Ishmael, a story telling gorilla, relates the details of the blob’s environment.

Nothing at all stirred on the land, except the wind and the dust. Not a single
blade of grass waved in the wind, not a single cricket chirped, not a
single bird soared in the sky…Even the seas were eerily still and silent, for
the vertebrates too were tens of millions of