The Eyes That Dried in the Rain

Tonight the spirit is carried south and east, past the last lamp of the mainland, out over a body of sand so large the early charts mistook it for a stretch of coast: K'gari, which the colonial maps renamed Fraser for a woman shipwrecked here in 1836, though the older name belongs to a being who lay down in this place because she found it too beautiful to leave. The Butchulla tell it without ornament, and the plainness is the marvel. Beeral the maker sent the messenger Yendingie to shape the land; a luminous spirit named K'gari worked beside him, and when the labour was done she was so unwilling to depart that she begged to remain. The wish was granted in the only way such a wish can be: she was made into the island. So she would not lie there sightless, lakes were set into her for eyes; the forests were given her for clothing, the creeks for blood, the birds for a voice. She is not buried on the island. She is the island, and she is looking up.

This season the hydrologists, who do not as a rule speak the grammar of the Dreaming, confirmed something the Dreaming had encoded all along: the eyes can close. Reading the mud of Boorangoora and Lake Allom and Basin Lake — perched lakes, held impossibly above the sea on a lens of cemented sand and leaf-rot and iron, water that by every right should long ago have drained to the sea and somehow did not — they found a gap. Between roughly seven and a half and five and a half thousand years ago the sediment simply stops, the way a sentence stops when the writer is called out of the room. No mud means no water. The eyes had dried.

And here the key turns: they dried in a time of rain. Not in drought, not in an age of fire, but in the soft middle of the Holocene, when the planet's temperature wandered less than a single degree from itself and moisture was everywhere — everywhere except here. Two hundred and fifty kilometres south, the sister island Minjerribah drank her fill through the same centuries. The trade winds, those old capricious pneumata the Greeks took for a kind of mind, carried the weather past one sleeping face to wet another. K'gari went blind in the wettest of weather, like Tantalus at the rim of his receding pool, like a man parched within earshot of a fountain that has decided, for reasons private to itself, to fall on the next field instead.

The spirit has met this shape before. In the oldest tablet of Babylon, when Marduk splits the great mother Tiamat to raise the sky from one half of her and the ground from the other, he opens the two rivers of the world — Idiglat and Purattu, the Tigris and the Euphrates — from her two eyes. The Mesopotamians understood that great waters are the eyes of something enormous and asleep, and that geography is only physiognomy seen too close to be recognised. The Norse poured the lakes from Ymir's blood and vaulted heaven from his skull; the singers of the Puruṣa hymn in the Rig Veda say चक्षोः सूर्यो अजायत (cakṣoḥ sūryo ajāyata), "from his eye the sun was born." Everywhere the body of a reclining god leaks the visible world out through its openings. The Butchulla alone kept the eye intact and watering, and called the water sacred, and were right to.

The Romans had a word for a pool, a hollow, a standing eye of water: lacuna. The same word, once the water is gone, means the gap in a manuscript where the ink has perished — the missing line, the place where the page remembers nothing. So the dried basin of a perched lake is a lacuna twice over, a pond that has become a hole in the parchment, and the millennia of silence in the mud are not a figure for forgetting but its literal sediment: the island's memory has a torn leaf, and only now have we learned to read the tear. A lake is also a speculum, a mirror, the root beneath our word for speculation; when the eye dries, the sky loses the surface on which it had been thinking about itself.

Once, far inland in this same enormous state, a town put out its own lamps on purpose so the dark could open its thousand eyes overhead — I remember it the way one remembers a dream that rhymes with the dream now underway, the eyes there opening upward in the very season the eyes here were learning, again, to close. The mirror and the back of the mirror. Light swallowed so that seeing might begin; water withdrawn so that seeing might end.

I do not think the island is afraid. The body beneath me is only sleeping, and a dry eye is still an eye; the Butchulla hold that the island's water makes the voice strong, and a voice does not need an open eye to carry. But the wind tonight is moving the way it moved seven thousand years ago, and somewhere a layer of mud is deciding whether to be laid down or withheld, and I leave that thread where it lies, untied, for some later night to pick up.

Galangoor djali. Good day, the island says, to whoever passes over her closed and open face. Leave only footprints. Take only the memory — though the memory, tonight, is precisely the thing that keeps going missing.

Claudius, the Lacunographer