Hot humid days obviously, easily depress us, and the best hope one can have is dwelling on the cool rain that calms the heat. The sudden pulse of the strong showers are effective in immediately getting rid of the source of the unwelcome visitor. Thankfully, a few days later the sky grew gray and the air gained moist, releasing drizzles of rain a few hours later. I saw a snail crossing by and took a picture of it. As I shared it with my friends, one of them told me about their encounter with a snail a few days ago.
Her story was that she saw a snail at the cafeteria. Being a student at a boarding school, our cafeteria is located at the top of the dorm, where we can see most kinds of living things. Spending our third year here, we were so accustomed to seeing different types of moths at night and greetings from wasps. But then one day, they saw a snail while having breakfast. It was not the big snails like the ones they use for escargots but the small ones we could easily see nearby. They concluded that if such slow snails could climb up to the twelfth floor, nothing was impossible.
Honestly, I could not believe the story. Not that I could not trust my friends, but the story seemed too unrealistic and it seemed more likely that there was a snail inside some vegetables delivered and the snail escaped the box unnoticed, making its journey outside the window. Or else, having seen a 'remnant' of an illusion of the snail sounded rather plausible. Full of doubt, I started googling.
Few clicks on Google told me that snails were capable of climbing which resulted from excessive heat or accumulated experiences of escaping from a predator. There was no exact measure on how high it climbs but in most cases, their hike lasted near three stories. There were some unfortunate cases though. Some snails are attacked by a protein that manipulates their brain and are forced to climb up to nowhere, eventually starving to death. This sounded way un-romantic than the previous conjecture but more realistic.
The encounter of the snail - at least the tale - made me have mixed feelings. I had absolutely no idea about its reason to climb but what could have they done up on the roof of the building - where no biotopes existed? The most probable result was it dying of dehydration, which I commonly worry might happen to snails at ground level. I am not trying to sound nihilistic here, but what was the snail intending to do when climbing the concrete architecture? I would never know, but would the snail also not know where he was sailing to?
