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."

As you go along, you literally collect places. I'm fed up with going to places; I shan't go to anymore.

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

I climbed a path and from the top looked up-stream towards Chile. I could see the river, glinting and sliding through the bone-white cliffs with strips of emerald cultivation either side. Away from the cliffs was the desert. There was no sound but the wind, whirring through thorns and whistling through dead grass, and no other sign of life but a hawk, and a black beetle easing over white stones.

The song and the land are one.

And the formation of man is the most pressing problem facing humanity.

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