The crocodiles, in their stillness, horrify him. “What are they waiting for, or what have they given up waiting for? In what time are they immersed? … The thought of a time outside our existence is intolerable.” -- Gore Vidal quotes Italo Calvino's Palomar, New York Review of Books, 1985. (Crocodile image from Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams, 2010).