The Joy of High Places Read online

  It was Wanitjunkupai when we arrived there, warm and sunny with a cloudless blue sky. At sunset we watched the looming Rock change from ochre to deep glowing red, and the sky from cerulean to duck-egg blue and pink. Cameras on tripods and phones clicked dozens of times. Every snap yielded a postcard perfect version of the monolith, its simplicity of form impossible to get wrong.

  ‘Is it just a Big Rock?’ I said. It was my secret fear. Not a temple, not a sacred mountain, not the beating heart keeping the land alive.

  ‘Yeah, it’s a Big Rock,’ said Anthony. He made it sound as if that was all it needed to be. ‘Bigger than the pyramids anyway, by far. The Great Pyramid is less than 150 metres high, and Uluru is nearly 350 metres.’

  ‘Well, I just want to walk around it,’ I said.

  That night at the pub we read Ulysses – it was still travelling with us – and Anthony read quietly in the fake Irish accent he had developed:

  Why did Bloom experience a sentiment of remorse?

  Because in immature impatience he had treated with disrespect certain beliefs and practices.

  As?

  The prohibition of the use of fleshmeat and milk at one meal, the hebdomadary symposium of incoordinately abstract, perfervidly concrete mercantile coexreligionist excompatriots: the circumcision of male infants; the supernatural character of Judaic scripture; the ineffability of the tetragrammaton; the sanctity of the Sabbath.

  How did these beliefs and practices now appear to him?

  Not more rational than they had then appeared, not less rational than others’ beliefs and practices now appeared.

  ‘I’m tired,’ I said.

  We set our alarm and got up in the dark next morning. I put on my walking gear and hefty boots, the ones that turn the planet under my heels, then we drove to Mala car park on the dark side of Uluru. The Rock loomed even larger than it had the day before, taking up most of the sky in front of us. It was before dawn, cool and fresh, but there was already a pale light as we shrugged on our daypacks, checked our water bottles and headed off along the track.

  At the beginning was a gate in front of metal posts, and chain that led up the Rock for those who wanted to climb. A sign said the Anangu people asked visitors not to climb, and next to it there was another sign indicating the climb was closed today because it was too windy at the top. But there was a woman climbing, about 20 metres up. A ranger appeared from nowhere and yelled, ‘Come down from there’. I slipped my hand into the pocket of my pants, feeling the small stone I had brought with me from my cup of stones at home.

  I’ve collected stones for years. Not often, just when I spot one that speaks to me. The first ones I picked up came from a beach on the coast south of Sydney decades ago when I was young with Anthony, and they seemed immediately to be talismans that would protect us and our lives together. It was just a feeling, not a thought-out cosmology; at that time I knew nothing about the idea of stones as powerful or sacred. The stone that represents me is like a flattened egg or lingam, an oval shape with swirling stripes of black and brown metamorphosed sand-stone; Anthony’s stone, I’m a bit embarrassed to say because it’s overly obvious, looks like a slightly flattened penis. On another visit to the same beach, I found two more stones, one for each of our sons; both of them elongated ovals of slate with threads of quartz through them, like veins in skin. I keep them all in an old painted cup on a windowsill in my study and occasionally take them out and hold them in the warmth of my palm, a private ritual of protection.

  I like the European walking tradition of placing stones in piles along the wayside. Stone piles probably started as a practical method of clearing stones off the path, but it’s become a ritual, honouring the landscape. They are often a kind of altar, acknowledging that this is a holy place. There are piles on high mountain passes, in front of grottoes, where someone has died, where a story has happened. Sometimes walkers bring stones from home and carry them all the way along the path and leave them at the end. At times stones are carried as a symbol of someone – as Jung said, soul-stones – or they are carried and left in a particular location to symbolise an inner letting go.

  Jung wrote that ancient peoples in many cultures collected certain stones as symbols of the life force, with the power to protect and create. The stones linked those who held them with ancestors and with place, and could even bring new life. The ‘Australian aborigines’, he said, rubbed a ‘child-stone’ with a tjuringa, a carved stone of sacred power, to make a new baby leap into the womb. He confessed that as a child he had ‘long kept a stone in my trouser pocket’ which he then hid in his attic with a manikin he made, and he visited and held it whenever he felt disturbed. It made him feel safe and calm, no longer at odds with himself.

  I have long kept all my stones, but a couple of days before leaving for Uluru I realised that I wanted to bring an offering with me. It didn’t take long before I knew it had to be one of the stones. Not my family stones, not even in the coldest light of rationality would I part with them, but I had other stones spilling around the cup, which I had picked up when I was walking in Australia and in Ireland, France, England, Italy. They were my connection to Australia where I was born on country, and to Europe where my long-ago ancestors had been born. On my second Camino walk in Spain I had carried one of them from Australia and left it on a vast pile of stones placed by pilgrims from all over the world at the Cruz de Ferro. It was a custom that had been practised for centuries. I didn’t know what it originally meant and I hadn’t felt any particular connection to the geographic place, but I did think about the people who had passed by there for a thousand years. All their stones nestled together there, connecting them across time and countries of origin.

  I looked at my stones, and held them and remembered where I had found them. The one I selected as an offering was a flat oval stone, a pale grey schist, about three centimetres by two, a good shape for skimming over water and small enough to slip into a pocket.

  The stone came from a creek in the Snowy Mountains, a low range that had once been a sea-bed dotted with volcanic islands. Much more recently ice ages had created glaciers, which carved out valleys and lakes and left glacial moraine in dramatic piles. It had been made of sea and fire and ice, and then eons had worn it down into a vast plateau dissected by deep gorges. I had walked in the Snowies at Easter three years earlier and had bent down to pick up this stone from the cold water, drawn by its smoothness and its small quiet shape.

  It lay in my pocket as I began walking, heading northwards and clockwise around the Rock, a crisp wind blowing back my hair. The path was close to the rock wall, which was red even in the pre-dawn light and filling one side of the sky. I touched the rock, just the once, palm against stone. Even though the air was cold, the rock was warm. The path snaked ahead, inviting circumnavigation, but apart from Anthony, there was no one else in sight.

  I snapped a picture of the white spinifex rippling in the wind in contrast with the red rock and the stunted green gums, and was surprised to see a skull shape in the stone. Afterwards I kept seeing shapes in the stone: a large fish, an elephant’s head, a Cappadocian cave-house, a screaming Edvard Munch face, ghost men in a cave, a brain, a heart, sexual organs – especially female. But I stopped taking pictures because the places I was most inclined to see shapes and faces were also the places the Anangu had designated as sacred. I couldn’t help thinking that we all want the earth to speak to us. To tell us something, anything.

  We came to Kantju Gorge, a narrow valley in the flank of Uluru. As I walked in, the wind dropped suddenly. The sides of the valley undulated like upright sand dunes, creating a feeling of enclosure in solid waves. Deep in the ‘V’ of the gorge there was a waterhole with a sign saying that it was a place to be quiet and to listen. I stood and stared at the dark water for a while and felt the flat stone in my pocket. Anthony, who had been walking several metres ahead of me, came back and stood beside me.

  ‘This place has a very strong feeling of stillness and silence,’ h
e said.

  ‘That’s what it says on the sign,’ I said.

  ‘Okay, well I didn’t read that.’

  ‘Probably just that the wind is stilled in here,’ I said.

  After the gorge, the path swung out away from the base of the Rock to avoid sites that were sacred to Anangu men. We were on the sunny north-eastern side now but it was still cool. A series of scooped-out dry pools cascaded down from the top, ending in a drop to the desert floor that must have been spectacular in the rain. All the caves and crevices had been created by millions of years of wind and rain; the course of water marked a greenish black by the algae that grew when it did rain. How determined is life to take advantage of such rare water!

  The path had widened and was patterned with other boot prints and bike tracks. The orangey-red dust scuffed under my boots, coated them, made them part of the landscape. I looked down and saw a line of caterpillars, head-to-toe, making a kind of caterpillar train over a metre long and as straight as a ruler. I looked them up later; they are called ‘processionary caterpillars’ and they follow a silken thread the lead caterpillar exudes. The spikily furry creatures looked so purposeful, plodding seemingly from nowhere to nowhere.

  On the sunrise side of the rock, it was warmer, with no shade. The air was dry and clear, parching to the throat and mouth. It was about four kilometres to the eastern end, the bottom of the heart, a straight stretch with nowhere to fill water bottles – we had stocked up with extra bottles so there was no chance of running out – but it did make me think about the white explorers trying to traverse this country with no knowledge of how to survive. And how did the Anangu survive with rare rainfall and only two shrinking water holes? Of course, they knew and still know the country so intimately that they could find moisture in hollows and soakages and even tree roots and, in winter, dew on the leaves of the sage bush and grasses. To me it was a country I could lay myself down on with awe, prostrate myself in wonder, but anything less than that – simple daily life – seemed impossible.

  The path here was about 200 metres from the base, which was a better position for seeing the rock, although I still wanted to be closer to it. It was its presence I wanted more than the view. It was on this side that I saw the Munch face, twisted and anguished; and the brain, eroded high up on the wall of rock. I thought, I cannot hear the Anangu stories, but the stone is telling me stories in a language I can hear, using metaphors and similes I can interpret. If the Rock is a sacred text, perhaps it speaks in different languages to all who come.

  We reached the eastern end, domed like a giant stupa – the red stone and blue sky more still and silent than I could have imagined. There was not even the promise of revelation that I had felt before in the bush. It felt older and more inaccessible than anything my twenty-first-century brain could know. I touched the oval stone in my pocket, but there was no answering pull.

  We set off into the heat along the southern side, the sun high enough now to light the whole rock. A formation like a giant fish, with small eyes and an open cave-mouth, gulping air, dwarfed the gums in front of it. In another couple of kilometres we reached a sign, Kuniya Walk, indicating another rock gorge. We followed the path into what, in this geography, could be called a glade – it had green grasses, cassia, white-skinned eucalypts, a little bridge and, high above, a love-heart carved by nature in the rock. At the end of the glade, at the bottom of a set of dry pools cascading down the rock, was the Mutitjulu Water-hole. The water was dark, shaded by the rock overhead, which was also in shade until near the top where the light transformed it into a pink glow. The whole effect was feminine; the folds of flesh-coloured rock, the creases, the dampness, the fronds of grasses.

  Ah, I thought, this is the place. I curled my hand around the stone in my pocket. It was warm in my palm, it fitted snugly. The sign near the waterhole told the story of the python woman Minyma Kuniya who defeated the warrior Wati Liru and then her spirit combined with her nephew’s to become Wanampi, the water snake. Wanampi controlled the water and would let it flow when the Anangu sang to her.

  People came and went, looking at the water hole, looking up at the shaded rock and the sunlit rock-flesh above, staring for a while. I waited. I didn’t want anyone to see me make my offering, not wanting anyone to think I was just throwing stones. I kept my hand on the stone, thinking about my stories, my family, how they had come to this country with a red heart in the middle of it. I was the first one of my family to come here to the centre; this was our offering, a small flat stone. It was from us, from everywhere we have put our roots into the soil. We are mixed in with this place now.

  I threw the small stone and it plopped in the mud near the pool. Immediately afterwards, and with a sharp pang, I thought, I should have asked the Anangu if it was all right to bring a gift like that. I was too absorbed in my own story to have thought of it before. In my set of stories it was a humble offering; in the Anangu stories it could be an intrusion, even a violation. It’s only a little stone, I told myself, made of the elements, made from the same earth, from the same history of sea and fire and ice, but the fact stuck like a pebble in a shoe; I didn’t ask. I had enacted my story and didn’t take account of theirs; it was the whole dark story of colonisers who never asked, compressed in one little stone. The stone is there now, sitting on the edge of a muddy waterhole at Uluru. I can feel it there in my heart, scraping uneasily.

  Phoenix

  When Barney announced that he intended to fly again, I couldn’t believe it. Surely he was announcing a fantasy, a longing that could only be fulfilled in an ideal world, not something he would actually do. Now that falling out of the sky and being smashed to pieces wasn’t a mere theoretical possibility but knowledge lived in a body in daily pain, how could he take a step off the earth again?

  It’s easy to understand the pull of high places, the physical sense of liberation. One year I walked over a range of mountains in Spain, the Sierra de O Courel mountains in Galicia, which held none of the terror of Mont Blanc but were still rough and wild. Each step up the mountain stretched calf and thigh muscles. With each step my foot ‘épousait la terre’, married the earth, as a Frenchman at the refugio where I stayed the night before told me it must, and each time my boot pulled the rotating planet towards me. I was eating the mountain.

  The gravel path underfoot crunched and shifted beneath my thick boots. It wasn’t hot but my body was sweating. Bare arms pulled downwards on the walking poles and palms were damp on the cork grips. I’d been walking for two hours, nearly all of it up the mountain.

  I rounded a steep corner and the slope on the right side of the path fell steeply away so that my line of sight was high above the trees and for the first time the vastness of the Sierra de O Courel was revealed. There were mountains and valleys rolling away as far as the eye could see; endless folding of light and shade, threads of mist, sun on beech and oak forests and on small meadows. And above, a vast dome of blue.

  I remembered a dream from decades ago; a walking dream, not flying. I was striding up a mountain path that fell away, crumbled, behind me. I could only keep going upwards. Ahead, beyond the mountain top, on the other side, angelic choirs were singing. When I reached the top, golden rays streamed out from the land beyond the mountain as the angelic chorus swelled. In the dream, my heart felt near to breaking.

  In the struggle upwards, in real life, that is, I began to feel the same sense of glory. Joy shafted through my body like light spilling into an old dusty room. Anthony, who was walking ahead, stopped at a rocky platform overhanging the mountain-side. He gazed across the ranges rising and falling all the way to the horizon. I stopped beside him.

  ‘All I need now is an angelic choir,’ I said. He had forgotten the dream, if I ever told him, and shrugged.

  ‘This must be the version of the world your brother gets when he flies,’ he said.

  ‘Birds see it every day,’ I said.

  We took photographs of each other on our phones; light exploding around us, arms w
ide, archangels with walking poles, lords of all we surveyed.

  We stepped back on the path, and around the next outcrop of rocks the village of O Cebreiro was nestled into the top of the mountain. It had cafes and an auberge, a souvenir shop and a chapel. And cars. It’s not hard to drive to the top of the mountain.

  Anthony walked off in search of coffee and I went into the chapel. In the 1300s, when an unbelieving priest was saying mass here, the bread and wine changed into actual flesh and blood and the blood flowed out of the chalice. It wasn’t any old chalice, it was the Holy Grail, the cup that Jesus drank from at the Last Supper, hidden here in the Middle Ages. The Holy Grail is gone now – no surprise there – but there was a crystal reliquary with alleged remains of flesh and blood, although I couldn’t see any identifiably bloodthirsty bits. The chapel was empty of worshippers despite the macabre miracle, but there was a CD playing, a choir singing the Hallelujah Chorus. I stood for a while, then went out to find Anthony.

  ‘There’s a choir of angels in the chapel,’ I said.

  I kept remembering that Barney had wished he’d been killed outright in the fall. It’s a confronting thing to hear a brother – anyone – say. No-one wants to think death is not the worst thing. Barney had repeated a number of times he would have chosen death over being ‘crippled’, his word, and being in constant severe pain. But now he was walking slowly, albeit in severe pain, he no longer had to use a catheter, his bowels were more-or-less working, he was alive. How could he even imagine risking it all again?

  He had seen a woman wheelchair flying several times over the years. She arrived at the launch site in a van with a team of at least two people, usually three, and a long, low wheelchair with three wheels. One person helped attach the harness and arranged the wing and the others waited by the chair to either hold it back or give it a push, depending on what was needed. Like everyone else, Barney had admired her courage and determination, but even before he had begun learning how to walk again, he knew he didn’t want to fly unless he could do it by himself. He wanted to be able to manage all the stages: setting up, taking off, landing on his feet and carrying his gear afterwards, without having to rely on others – it was that or nothing.