A Body of Water

by Beverley Farmer

  Lamas in those solitudes, those with occult powers, instead of shaving their heads grow their hair and braid it with lengths of black yak-wool. Around their necks they hang a coral-and-bone rosary of one hundred and eight beads, each one carved from a different human skull.

  At a great rasp behind him, as of a mountain shifting, the Hermit swings round with a flutter of hems. He is a geranium petal in the sun, a red-golden gnat. Above him rears a glacier-shape of stone lapped with scales of lichen. A great cavern opens in it and lo! it is blue, a blue darkness, ethereal blue, the vault not of any Pure Land of Boundless Light but of his Land alone, of the beloved mountains, of the Land of Snows. A melting tongue of blue extends and thankfully the Hermit of Tsang lets himself be gathered in upon it.

  It is so cold on these high passes that if you happen to stand weeping there, the tears will not trickle or splash at your feet as they would anywhere in our land, but will become in their descent beads of ice, hail ringing faintly, hitting the rock floor.

  There are dry river beds in the Land of Snows filled with crazed sun and sand only, like those in the hot desert regions of our own land; and they too can suddenly flood, taking unawares the people and cattle camped in them. The glaciers of the Mountains of Snow are old, old, left behind from the last Ice Age of the world, great white lizards clamped in crystal on the crags and peaks. No new snow will arise to take their place. For they are melting. Every day that the sun shines in their burning glass the surface melts, dilates into drips, and great tongues of water go rolling and ruffling along the ancient paths until at last, far below, as night falls, they come to the dry river beds. With nightfall on the peaks the crystal stiffens. Under the stars no more water flows. By daybreak the absence of the river will have reached down into the gorges and all day the sand will dry its colours in the bare sun. These are the ghosts of rivers, night-flowering vines of water, rivers of dream.

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  Thanks to Trish Waddington for permission to quote from personal letters.

  Some of the poems have appeared in Island Magazine, The Age, Luna, Fine Line. ‘Figs’ was first published in Moments of Desire, Penguin Books, 1989. The story ‘A Drop of Water’ was first published in Australian Short Stories; ‘Among Pigeons’ in The Australian Literary Supplement; ‘Black Genoa’ in Mattoid; ‘Vase with Red Fishes’ (as ‘Interior with Goldfish’) in Island Magazine; ‘Land of Snows’ in The Phoenix Review.

  This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

  The Giramondo Publishing Company is grateful for the support given to its publishing program by Western Sydney University.