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Called by the voice of the earth ...
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Exposed to the power of the elements for so long, Australia's desert face is scoured clean, scraped to bedrock bones. The heart of Earth's oldest continent is the Red Centre, an immense desert too vast and powerful to be contemplated as a whole. White settlers named the desert bit by bit: The Tanami, the Tirari, the Strzelecki, the Simpson, the Sturt Stony Desert. One is rimmed with crimson flowers that cry like hearts turned inside-out; another crusted with diamonds of salt.
Some are paved with desert varnish -- rocks burnished shiny red-brown as if shined with oxblood shoe polish. Some undulate with orange dunes; others are raw maroon rocks flicked with mere skiffs of sand. Each name has its own story, each desert its own character. All the deserts glint with a promise of clarity. Through the eastern quadrant of the continental basin, maps show the vein-like lacework of the ghostly Dimatina River, a netting of sandy rivulets and dusty watercourses that lie empty of water for years on end, open in aching anticipation.
"Camel handlers from Afghanistan were the first non-natives able to cope with these deserts," said my newly acquired friend Robin as we sat outside our musty-smelling canvas tent. The desert sun dropped slowly, its softening light transforming nearly colorless sand dunes into dreamy ocean waves.
According to the sketchy maps we’d been given, Robin and I were somewhere near a tiny settlement called Maree along the Birdsville Track, the remnants of an old camel route that skimmed the edge of Australia's great artesian basin. We were heading for Alice Springs, tracing, on the ground, the route flown by Australia's legendary Royal Flying Doctor Service. Its small planes are still the only practical way to provide medical care to people scattered over more than five thousand miles of desert.
"Naturally, the Afghanis brought their camel saddles from home and whatever stuffing they used to pad saddles a century ago happened to contain the seeds of rosy dock,” she continued, waving toward the improbable purple flowers fringing the roadside, her dark eyes gleaming as she warmed to the tale. “Hard desert riding loosened the saddle stuffing bit by bit so that now, whenever spring brings a trace of rain, the old camel tracks erupt with an extravagance of pink and purple blooms," she said, her gentle British accent incising each detail with assurance. Robin, I was learning, easily dipped into decades of stories gathered while living in Denmark, in Peru, and now Australia.
The accidental blossoms of rosy dock, as hearty as the cameleers who spread them, seemed both a jubilant relic and a promise of renewal for those like me who came to Australia to track their dreams. Feeling an odd kinship with long-gone camel traders criss-crossing these alien deserts, I wondered what stray bits might escape from my own baggage, what serpentine trail my own remnants might trace.
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