Uluru

Bringing their tribute from the four corners of the earth, ... people, animals and plants. For what? For a rock; the Rock of Ages, a smooth red monolith pitted and creviced like the moon, horrendously old. The sun is not yet risen, but the living things collect to worship it - hands, in the mudra of awe; tails, flickering; leaves, trembling. Desert morning chill. With the first beam of horizontal sunshine, the gargantuan Rock glows like an ember. Then the crowds disperse.

A while later, near Mala Puta, my circuit pilgrimage begins. The Rock, ever on my right, rises up for hundreds of meters quite sheer, in capes and coves, some parts strangely perforated, resembling cavities in bone. Beneath a few of these, boulders have accrued, providing shelter for the tribute-bearers of dawn and dusk. In places, cave walls have been daubed with symbols in ochre, clay or charcoal: fire-sticks, stars, waterholes and snakes. Here, we are all part of a universe reduced to bare essentials, through which we move silently but mindfully. Rock fig and bush plum, aborigine and white, wallaby and skink - we wax and wane as the desert seasons pass. Uluru alone aloof, foursquare. An eye in the deep blue sky is watching us.

I come to a cave where Kuniya, the ancestral python, is thought to have her lair.

A clutch of giant stone eggs
In a scoop of red-striped rock -
Through spinifex grass,
The autumn breeze.