From another platform: “Always a pleasure to read! Thank you Jamal! ... Thank you for this story - it’s a wonderful read!”

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“Reading is thinking with someone else’s brain.” Jorge Luis Borges

Bullish Awkwardness

An inconspicuous line. On the map it read Ephemeral River. A river that rarely flows. I found that poetic. Be like water, Bruce Lee says. “Water doesn’t lie,” you said.

The canyon simmered, light flickering over ferns and lianas and countless plants I anachronistically identified with my field guide. We had no reception anyway. I noted proteas and euphorbias, gnarled, thorny plants like Leucadendron spissifolium and Euphorbia triangularis clinging defiantly to the slopes. Between rocks grew lithophytes and succulents such as Crassula perfoliata and Aloe ferox.

The Umzimkulwana River murmured softly. I observed a gesture of bullish awkwardness in one of the Dutchmen from the camp. He reminded me of another you, of a story I had not yet told. I withdrew from you in my thoughts and sped off on my express train of reminiscence.

Finke Gorge National Park baked in the sun, the light shimmering across a spinifex steppe. The Finke River — or Larapinta, as the Arrernte call it — is one of the oldest still recognisable rivers on Earth. Three hundred to three hundred and fifty million years, they say. Back then Australia lay in a humid tropical belt. Now it stretches like a geological scar through the arid centre of the Northern Territory, an ephemeral river system that carries water only episodically. Only here and there does the Finke appear as a chain of waterholes. These ecological refuges are often spiritual sites. In the heat, the puddles mirror the sun and create the illusion of unreal surfaces.

They are liquid deceptions in the dust.

Grotesquely branching river red gums lined the banks. You read them as symbols of a primordial black despair.

We followed the sandy track that was hardly more than a hint of movement — or, to put it grandly, a forgotten thought of God, or, a few storeys lower, a stranded dream. Its stillness was a totalitarian category. For over a hundred million years the riverbed had scarcely changed. There was no older bed in the world.

Above the dusty floodplains rose the MacDonnell Ranges. Massive, polished slate saddles. Alluvial sediments covered the valley floor.

From my notes

Weathered organic material and fossil remains of prehistoric vegetation.

Pebbles glowed like petrified drops.

Forgetfulness turned to dust.

Now and then black inclusions flashed — charred fragments that, in my imagination, were relics from the age of Pangaea. Did the heart of the supercontinent beat here? Perhaps this riverbed is the Earth remembering itself in a more original form. A geological dog‑ear.

Ignorance and impatience are like uninvited guests here.

The dry land has its own balance; one must be attentive not to overlook what matters. It demands silence, deliberate movements at the right time of day, and inherited knowledge. This region hides its life‑giving essence in concealed oases and pushes my capacity for resonance and adaptation to its limits. Precious water sources are signalled by plants one must learn to find and recognise. What is edible is often hidden underground.

I want to learn what knowledge has been preserved through modern times in the seclusion of ancient survival rituals. Building a bridge into this kind of consciousness feels here like a calling — a necessity for whatever awaited me back in Europe. A gathering of impressions that would one day assemble into an image, at the right time, in the right place.

The light flickered. It was harsh, restless. The air vibrated. You saw what was not there. Reflections distorted the terrain and encouraged every imaginable optical illusion. The Elder, too, appeared before us like a hallucination. In a soliloquy he spoke of his walkabout half a century earlier. I associated it with the Grand Tour and a spiritual journeyman’s wandering. Every step had been a prayer, he said.

He told us you know where you are when you listen to what the ground is saying.

“You don’t go for looking,” he said. “You go for remembering.”

For young Aboriginal men of earlier generations, the walkabout was an initiation ritual marking the passage into adulthood. They travelled alone — often for months or even years — on foot through the land of their ancestors. The aim was to connect with Dreamtime, sacred places, songlines, and the spirit of the land. It was a spiritual journey in which one sought and found identity, origin, and responsibility within the cosmic order.

You said nothing. You knew I had to go through this alone. And I loved you for it.

Botanical Wonder

The Elder vanished like a mirage. Every image and impression evaporated. Nothing clung except the dust that mixed with sweat into a greasy film. We reached Finke Gorge. The furrowed trench was older than the mountains beside it.

We stood in awe before a cleft the river had milled over millions of years — a slice through Earth’s history.

Weathered quartzites and sedimentary layers from the Proterozoic.

We reached Palm Valley. Do you remember? Suddenly green amid all that rust red. “Look, there they are. Those are Red Cabbage Palms — Livistona mariae,” you said. You could remember things like that. And that they occur only in this gorge. A botanical miracle. I fell silent in reverence.

An endemic species, enclosed in this basin, dependent on underground springs and rare rain.

“Relics,” you said. “Like voices from another time.”

I wonder today whether you noticed — that this place tore something open inside me.