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Elongate and engorge a gastraphetes’ central cylinder to the point that a dragon would notice it, however, and it becomes impossible to fire without gripping it more firmly than even the strongest archer could manage.

The horses are thunderously huge, the fibre-glass designs on the central cylinder – all gurning clowns and animals twisting to look over their own shoulders in terror – utterly sinister, and the tinkling music oddly transporting.

The museum, which opened in 1935, got its own building 60 years later – the postmodern structure by Mario Botta, recognisable by its stacked boxes of red brick and central cylinder wrapped in zebra stripes of black and white stone.

Three weeks after finding the device, on a sun-gilded afternoon when perhaps every other child in Zollverein is outdoors, he notices that its longest wire, a slender filament coiled hundreds of times around the central cylinder, has several small breaks in it.

The louse-like offspring sticks its proboscis into the tissues as far as the central cylinder.