To catch this breath in the river you need the patience of one who can spend days doing nothing. Then with the outward breath, the tide turns and the serpent flows back to its own circulating mass of shallow waters in the giant water basin in a crook of the mainland whose sides separate it from the open sea. Imagine the serpent's breathing rhythms as the tide flows inland, edging towards the spring waters nestled deeply in the gorges of an ancient limestone plateau covered with rattling grasses dried yellow from the prevailing winds. This tidal river snake of flowing mud takes in breaths of a size that is difficult to comprehend. It is all around in the atmosphere and is attached to the lives of the river people like skin. They say its being is porous it permeates everything. This is where the giant serpent continues to live deep down under the ground in a vast network of limestone aquifers. When it finished creating the many rivers in its wake, it created one last river, no larger or smaller than the others, a river which offers no apologies for its discontent with people who do not know it. And it came out at another spot along the coastline and crawled inland and back again. The serpent travelled over the marine plains, over the salt flats, through the salt dunes, past the mangrove forests and crawled inland. The water filled the swirling tracks to form the mighty bending rivers spread across the vast plains of the Gulf country. The sea water following in the serpent's wake, swarming in a frenzy of tidal waves, soon changed colour from ocean blue to the yellow of mud. Picture the creative serpent, scoring deep into - scouring down through - the slippery underground of the mudflats, leaving in its wake the thunder of tunnels collapsing to form deep sunken valleys. It came down those billions of years ago, to crawl on its heavy belly, all around the wet clay soils in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Looking down at the serpent's wet body, glistening from the ancient sunlight, long before man was a creature who could contemplate the next moment in time. It moved graciously - if you had been watching with the eyes of a bird hovering in the sky far above the ground. The ancestral serpent, a creature larger than storm clouds, came down from the stars, laden with its own creative enormity. LITTLE GIRLS WHO COME BACK HOME AFTER CHURCH ON SUNDAY, WHO LOOK AROUND THEMSELVES AT THE HUMAN FALLOUT AND ANNOUNCE MATTER-OFFACTLY, ARMAGEDDON BEGINS HERE. CALLING INNOCENT LITTLE BLACK GIRLS FROM A DISTANT COMMUNITY WHERE THE WHITE DOVE BEARING AN OLIVE BRANCH NEVER LANDS. A NATION CHANTS, BUT WE KNOW YOUR STORY ALREADY.ĬHURCH BELLS CALLING THE FAITHFUL TO THE TABERNACLE WHERE THE GATES OF HEAVEN WILL OPEN, BUT NOT FOR THE WICKED.

Carpentaria by Alexis Wright