Hair and bone ground against your eye. Over time the pressure worsened. Your head sunk sideways into smooth flesh. Your mouth was overcome by cold skin and you gave up any illusion of breathing.

You could still hear the beating of hearts but now something subtle and new had entered your mind. You became aware of a music, or a rhythm above the chaos of rhythms in the bodies around you. Hearts below beat differently to hearts above. Erratic, sporadic pumping descended to solid syncopation, to regular marches of hearts, to metronomic ones, two, threes and fours, to a single final pulse that echoed in the beating hearts of every shivering creature.

Even though your internal timing seemed your own - you became aware that with every strike of that primal hammer your heart made a beat, beating many times in between. But even your private rhythm you sympathetically shared more and more closely with those around me; a body next to yours contracting its heart as yours filled with blood, sucking in red when yours squirted fuel around your squashed body.

You could hear hearts immediately beyond, pumping in time with your own. All of your bodies, moving to accommodate the subtle motions around you.