I never liked Jules Verne, believing that the real was always more fantastic than the fantastical.

When people start talking of man's inhumanity to man it means they haven't actually walked far enough.

Even today, when an Aboriginal mother notices the first stirrings of speech in her child, she lets it handle the "things" of that particular country: leaves, fruit, insects and so forth. "We give our children guns and computer games," Wendy said. "They gave their children the land."

I pictured a low timber house with a shingled roof, caulked against storms, with blazing log fires inside and the walls lined with all the best books, somewhere to live when the rest of the world blew up.

If this were so; if the desert were 'home'; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert - then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal's imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings a prison.

And when you look along the way we've come, there are spirals of vultures wheeling.

Travel doesn't merely broaden the mind. It makes the mind.