She looms from the hyaline like some mutant barnacle—frond once a pillar of smoke, operculum blown off—that has assumed a couchant pose, waiting for the searchers with mist-nets and calipers to return each year who pit the caltrop against magnirostris and scratch protean generations from her flank, until she blows again or sounds and sinks back to Gondwanaland’s deep ocean drift
(Weston 2005, p. 49)
The sight of Daphne Major conveys something like this [passage of time] to us, even in the first glance over the water, or in the last, as it revolves like a wood chip in the wake of the boat. We know we are looking at a place that was here before we came and will remain when we are gone. The very island will sink someday, and another will rise when it is drowned.
(Weiner 1994, p. 303)