The legendary naturalist John Muir often paired his paintings of birds with a few short, elegant phrases meant to evoke the simple grandeur of his subjects. I wanted to play around with this sensibility by trying this exercise from the other direction, taking my weary, closed-minded fictional explorer Sir Alfoar Kingsley, and confronting him with an aesthetically miserable - though weirdly noble - little beast. Here's the text:

Beyond the snow-crowned Himalaya lies a vast mire, whose sole inhabitants, owing to their utter uselessness, harbor no congenital fear of Man. Hideous beyond compare, a sort of crustacean with marsupial pretensions, by day they scurry and dart between the reeds, sucking moss and slime from the rocks, furtively guarding their eggs, cowering in the shadows. At night they huddle shivering, miserable and cold, and there, amongst the mud and filth, they raise their beastly heads to wail and gurgle at the stars. - Dr. Sir Alfoar Kingsley.