“Angela 1's voice: [voice over] The Outback. The Dead Heart. The desert. These names make you think of images of heat, vast tracts of sand, a featureless wasteland where little grows and nothing lives. Many people think a desert is a desolate and lonely place. But in the desert, by moonlight, animals that are nowhere to be seen during the say are everywhere.”
(p. 15)
“Angela 1's voice: [voice over] The areas of Australia were once covered by sheets of polar ice and, well before that, by great areas of shallow seas. As our continent edges slowly northwards, its desert regions will have time to reach the equator and once again become tropical regions.
Angela 3: Inside the sand is a forest. Waiting for water.”
(p. 16)
“Angela 1's voice: [voice over] In the Simpson Desert the rainfall is low, but it is not a virtually rainless desert like the Atacama or Sahara. Even here annual rainfall is hardly below 130 millimetres anywhere. In autumn when monsoonal troughs have penetrated this far south, often if also means floods when three to four years worth of rain come in one fall.
Angela 3: Nothing, nothing, nothing, then a downpour, like three deaths in a row.
Slight pause.
When it comes it comes. . .
An announcement of the loud speaker:
Voice-over: Attention please, ladies and gentlemen. There will be a stop shortly, at Finke River. We will stop for approximately 45 minutes. You can leave the train if you wish. But you must be back on board in plenty of time for departure. Thank you for your attention.
Angela 3: [calculating] If I walk for a quarter of an hour to the east then quarter of an hour to the west, I'll make it back in plenty of time.
(p. 17)
“Angela 3: I can hear it breathing, I can hear it, it's moving inside it's moving everywhere, the wind the birds, the air the sky the moon, the stars, the clouds, the grass, the earth, the ants the worms, the spiders, the leaves the trunks, the apples and oranges, the rain the hurricanes the sausages we eat, the potatoes down in the earth, the insects, the darkness, the tree shadows the roots under the ground, the caves, my lunch box my walking, the stillness the winter the hail the snow, little bushes in the desert, the heat rising off the desert the rivers the ponds the puddles, the sea and the ocean the moon the stars outer space. The wind, the wind in the sea, the sun in the sand, the rain in the clouds, me in the storm, my body held in the gale rigid forced backwards, the worms down there inside the dry sand, the stars in the sky the hot air in my lungs, the drops of rain down my neck, my back, inside my nose, my mouth, my red blood pumping next to the river, the current, the tide, the rapids, the twig on the water shooting past, the cold night, the dark air, the age of the sand, my feet on the ground, the light all over, the day light making day bright, falling on my skins, warming me, heating me, sand stuck to my face, but under the shade of the tree, the shadow.
Pause
I'm inside it.”
(p. 18-9)
