the sun caught their glassy wings.
I walked. And as I moved deeper into the solitude of the land, its expansive stillness—which was not stillness in fact but an interweaving of close but distant voices so dense that they became one, and then mere background, then scarcely there at all—I began to forget my own disruptive presence, receding as naturally into what hummed and shimmered all round me as into a dimension of my own being that it had taken my coming out here, alone, in the slumbrous hour after midday, to uncover. I felt drawn, drawn on.
I had enough bush sense, a good enough eye for recording, unconsciously as I passed, the little oddnesses in the terrain—the elbow of a fallen bough, a particular assembly of glossy-leaved bushes that would serve as signposts on my way back—to feel confident I wouldn't get lost. I let Stuart, seated gloomily back there on his log, hugging his rifle, hugging even closer his dumb grief, fade from my thoughts, and moved deeper into the becalmed early-afternoon light, over spatterings ofancient debris, crumblings of dried-out timber. Slowly, all round and under me, an untidy grey-green world was continuously, visibly in motion. Ti-tree trunks unfurled tattered streamers; around their roots a seepage like long-brewed tea.
I walked, and the great continent of sound I was moving into recorded my presence, the arrival, in its close-woven fabric of light, sound, stilled or moving shadow, of a medium-sized foreign body, displacing the air a moment as it advanced, and confusing, with the smell of its sweat and the shifting of its breath, the tiny signals that were being picked up and translated out there by a myriad of forms of alien intelligence. I was central to it but I was also nothing, or close to nothing.
In the compacted heat and drowsy afternoon sunlight, I could have kept walking for ever, all the way to the Gulf. It was time, not space, I was moving into. Years it might be. And there was more of it—not just ahead but on all sides—than I could conceive of or measure.
There was no specific point I was heading for. I could stop now, turn back, and it would all still be here. It was myself I was moving into.
One day, far off down the years, I would come stumbling back in my body's last moments of consciousness and here it would be: crumbling into itself and dispersing its particles and voices, reassembling itself cell by cell in a new form that was also the old one remade. I had no need to go on and actually see it, the place where I would lie down in the springy marsh-grass, among the litter and mould, letting the grass take the impression of my weight, the shape of my body's presence, and keep it long after I was gone.
Away back, when I first heard about the Valley and let it form itself in my mind, I had thought that everything I found unsatisfactory in myself, in my life but also in my nature, would come right out here, because that is what I had seen, or thought I had, in others. Kids who had been out here, and whom I had thought of till then as wild and scattered, had come back settled in their own aggregation of muscle, bone, and flesh, and in some new accommodation with the world.
Nothing like that had come to me. I was no more settled, no less confused. I would bring nothing back that would be visible to others— to my father, for instance. I had lost something; that was more like it. But happily. As I walked on into this bit of grey-green nondescript wilderness I was happily at home in myself. But in my old self, not a new one.
I don't know how far I had gone before I paused, looked around, and realised I was lost. For the last ten minutes I had been walking in my sleep. The landscape of small shrubs and ti-trees I had been moving through was now scrub.
I consulted the sun and turned back the way I had come. Minutes later I looked again and changed tack. It was hot. I had begun to sweat. I took my shirt off, draped it round my neck, and set off again.
Five
I walked. And as I moved deeper into the solitude of the land, its expansive stillness—which was not stillness in fact but an interweaving of close but distant voices so dense that they became one, and then mere background, then scarcely there at all—I began to forget my own disruptive presence, receding as naturally into what hummed and shimmered all round me as into a dimension of my own being that it had taken my coming out here, alone, in the slumbrous hour after midday, to uncover. I felt drawn, drawn on.
I had enough bush sense, a good enough eye for recording, unconsciously as I passed, the little oddnesses in the terrain—the elbow of a fallen bough, a particular assembly of glossy-leaved bushes that would serve as signposts on my way back—to feel confident I wouldn't get lost. I let Stuart, seated gloomily back there on his log, hugging his rifle, hugging even closer his dumb grief, fade from my thoughts, and moved deeper into the becalmed early-afternoon light, over spatterings ofancient debris, crumblings of dried-out timber. Slowly, all round and under me, an untidy grey-green world was continuously, visibly in motion. Ti-tree trunks unfurled tattered streamers; around their roots a seepage like long-brewed tea.
I walked, and the great continent of sound I was moving into recorded my presence, the arrival, in its close-woven fabric of light, sound, stilled or moving shadow, of a medium-sized foreign body, displacing the air a moment as it advanced, and confusing, with the smell of its sweat and the shifting of its breath, the tiny signals that were being picked up and translated out there by a myriad of forms of alien intelligence. I was central to it but I was also nothing, or close to nothing.
In the compacted heat and drowsy afternoon sunlight, I could have kept walking for ever, all the way to the Gulf. It was time, not space, I was moving into. Years it might be. And there was more of it—not just ahead but on all sides—than I could conceive of or measure.
There was no specific point I was heading for. I could stop now, turn back, and it would all still be here. It was myself I was moving into.
One day, far off down the years, I would come stumbling back in my body's last moments of consciousness and here it would be: crumbling into itself and dispersing its particles and voices, reassembling itself cell by cell in a new form that was also the old one remade. I had no need to go on and actually see it, the place where I would lie down in the springy marsh-grass, among the litter and mould, letting the grass take the impression of my weight, the shape of my body's presence, and keep it long after I was gone.
Away back, when I first heard about the Valley and let it form itself in my mind, I had thought that everything I found unsatisfactory in myself, in my life but also in my nature, would come right out here, because that is what I had seen, or thought I had, in others. Kids who had been out here, and whom I had thought of till then as wild and scattered, had come back settled in their own aggregation of muscle, bone, and flesh, and in some new accommodation with the world.
Nothing like that had come to me. I was no more settled, no less confused. I would bring nothing back that would be visible to others— to my father, for instance. I had lost something; that was more like it. But happily. As I walked on into this bit of grey-green nondescript wilderness I was happily at home in myself. But in my old self, not a new one.
I don't know how far I had gone before I paused, looked around, and realised I was lost. For the last ten minutes I had been walking in my sleep. The landscape of small shrubs and ti-trees I had been moving through was now scrub.
I consulted the sun and turned back the way I had come. Minutes later I looked again and changed tack. It was hot. I had begun to sweat. I took my shirt off, draped it round my neck, and set off again.
Five
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