" The land became more rocky and he wandered through thin canyons where the wind whispered like a lover or howled like an assassin. The stone was layered as a terrine with fossils: the leaves of trees that had existed when the land was fertile; giant pachyderms; the fearsome teeth and claws of rapacious dinosaurs; and once a piece of cranium and part of the jaw bone of a creature that heralded humanity yet whose skull was distinctly ape-like in origin. Joseph held these bones in his hands and felt a connection between himself and the earth that sang a song of evolution, a lost melody he strained to hear like the last lingering notes of perfume belonging to the one woman he loved. "
― Sanjida O'Connell , The Priest and the Lily