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Bruce Chatwin – Songlines

 Each of the Ancients, now basking in the sunlight put his left foot forward and called out a second name.  He put his right foot forward and called out a third name.  He named the waterhole, the reedbeds, the gum trees – calling to right and left, calling all things into being and weaving their names into verses.

The Ancients sang their way all over the world.  They sang the rivers and ranges, salt pans and sand dunes.  They hunted, ate, made love, danced, killed, wherever their tracks led they left a trail of music.

They wrapped the whole world in a web of song; at last when the earth was sung, they felt tired.  Again in their limbs they felt the frozen immobility of Ages.  Some sank into the ground where they stood.  Some crawled into caves.  Some crept away to their Eternal Homes, to the ancestral waterholes that bore them.

All of them went ‘back in’.