… sand dune, left behind as the sea receded to the east. It wavers, a stretch of high, dry ground, across swampland. At its foot runs a river. Not one of the great rivers of the region, surging in a tangled bed from mountain to sea. Nor one of those rivers’ dark cousins, the aquifers that find their way to the coast through hidden channels below ground.
This river is small and shallow, running swiftly from its source a few miles inland where it bubbles up, clear water from cones of fine white silt, among tutu and flax, toetoe and fern. It forms an estuary behind a coastal bar, before pouring through a narrow opening into the wide blue waters of a bay. At one end of the bay, to the north, there’s a fretwork of mountains, white-tipped, even in summer. At the other end there are the truncated remains of two ancient volcanoes, leaning companionably back to back, their calderas long since flooded as indented harbours, their hills meeting the sea as a peninsula wheel of tiny bays cupped between jagged cliffs of ancient lava.
The sand dune curves along the river’s northern bank. It slopes gently down to its swift waters. The dune is made up of schist and granite, ground to dust, and shells and the fragments of monstrous creatures who once swam in warm oceans, all teeth and predatory purpose. It contains the bones of seabirds and seals and fish, the ash of fires, the remains of centuries of human feasting.
They lie beneath fern and tutu, shimmering from time to time when the earth jumps as it is wont to do. These are restless islands, forced to the surface by the collision of vast continental plates set in opposition, grinding endlessly against one another.
The surface shimmers at their meeting, and people on the surface have imagined restless things: a waka, rocking on a primeval sea. A giant fish dragging at the hook. They have imagined also a woman lying as the curve of hills and valleys and the sky leaning tenderly over her, filling her with life. They have imagined, when the earth shimmers, a baby god stirring, rolling within her great belly, kicking beneath her skin, making mountains fall, boulders rain down, wide chasms open. The little foetal earthquake god, forever in a state of gestation, forever about to be born.
All that, within the sand dune.
And now its surface is dotted with white pegs. A mile or so to the west, a city has been laid down on fern and tutu, devised by military men with a military precision at this outpost of empire. A city of right angles built about a central cruciform square. The swamp has been divided as neatly as pounds of butter into uniform blocks, for ease of sale and purchase. The original inhabitants have been consigned to their inevitable decline on a few reserves about the perimeter, while at the centre have risen a cathedral in the Gothic style for the Anglicans, another with a Roman cupola for the Catholics, banks and theatres, churches, places of commerce, offices, shops, factories, foundries, schools and parks for healthful recreation. And houses, of course, for the accommodation of those who will labour here. Whose hands and eyes and minds can be harnessed to that great cause which is the advancement of civilisation. The citizens.
Year by year, their houses have sprung up as the suburbs have stepped steadily from the centre across swamp and plain.
And here. To the sand dune by the …