The pipe I have here is about the size and shape of a kazoo, the children's toy music pipe that makes buzzing sounds when you blow through it. So it's not like any normal modern pipe with a long stem and a bowl at one end. This one is carved in reddish stone and has a flat base about four inches (10 cm) long, so it's almost exactly the colour and the size of a bourbon biscuit, and at one end is carved a small hole to serve as the mouth piece. The pipe bowl is halfway down, but it's no simple hollow for holding the tobacco, because it's in the shape of the upper half of a swimming otter, with its paws perched on the bank of a river, and it looks as though it's just popped up out of the water to look around. The stone is smooth, and to me it beautifully suggests the sleek wet fur of the animal. The otter looks along the pipe so that, as you smoke it, both you and the otter would be looking into each other's eyes. But in fact you are even closer to this animal than that suggests, because if I try to smoke it now and put it to my mouth, I discover that I am literally nose-to-nose with the otter. And that contact would have been even more striking than it is now, because the empty eye sockets would have been inlayed with fresh water pearls. This wonderfully crafted and evocative object pinpoints in history the world's earliest use of tobacco pipes. Sherlock Holmes probably didn't know it, but this is where the story of pipe-smoking begins.