Stratum I — Seconds

Time at this depth is restless. Each second is a single grain of dust settling — visible, individual, almost weightless. The escapement releases the pendulum, and the pendulum releases another moment into the archive.

Here, at the surface, nothing has yet been compressed. Every event still remembers itself as it was lived: discrete, bright, full of edges.

Stratum II — Hours

A few centimetres deeper, the seconds have begun to forget themselves. They lean against one another in soft drifts; the work of the day is no longer a sequence but a settling.

The hour hand, which has no memory of the second hand it once was, sweeps with the patience of one who has learned that nothing arrives early.

Stratum III — Months

By the third stratum, the days have lost their names. They are remembered only as weather — a long damp, a sudden brightness, the season of one particular smell. The calendar grid has dissolved into a single washed colour.

Sandstone is patient. It records only what was carried there by water, and only what stayed when the water left.

Stratum IV — Decades

Decades are written in calcium and quiet. Generations stack here as fossils stack — face-down, half-erased, recognisable only by silhouette. A childhood becomes a thin pale line; an entire decade may be a single ribbon of carbon.

The pendulum's swing is no longer audible. What remains is the pressure of having occurred.

Stratum V — Eons

At the base of the column, time is no longer a sequence — it is a stone. The events of a continent occupy a single dark band; a species, a single grain. From here, the surface is unimaginably far above, but it is also exactly as close as it ever was.

An archive at this depth requires no reader. Pressure has done the reading already.