Lost Paradise by Cees Nooteboom Read Free Book Online

river. The silence is broken by unknown sounds. ‘CROCODILES FREQUENT THIS AREA. KEEP CHILDREN AND DOGS AWAY FROM THE WATER’S EDGE.’ I stare at the gleaming black surface, at the red soil beneath my feet, at the dry eucalyptus leaves, curled into the shapes of letters as if they had been shaken from a tray of type. There is very little traffic on this road, so we are alone in our cloud of dust. The few cars coming towards us can be seen from miles off, like clouds or apparitions. I feel happy. When we finally get to Ubirr, it takes us about an hour to walk to the site.
    ‘Majesty,’ Almut murmurs. I look at her to see what she means. She points at the view and puts an arm around me, as though she wants to protect me. But from what?
    ‘It’s all so old,’ she says at last. ‘It makes me feel ancient too, as if I’ve been here forever. Time is nothing. A mere fart. Someone could blow us away with a single puff. What’s a thousand years? Nothing at all. If we were to come back, we wouldn’t know ourselves. We’d have the same brains, but different software. I know what I’m talking about, because I’ve been staring much too long into the eyes of the Abos. Doesn’t it bother you? For a thousand years, or even ten thousand years, the same eyes, the same landscape. They are their own eternity, but no one can endure that for very long.’ Then she laughs and says, ‘Fired for being too solemn.’ But she is right. Everything – the stones, the trees, the rocks – do their best to thrust their antiquity at you, there is not a single human voice to distract you, and intruders are scared off by the malevolent gleam of the stones – no wonder they think this ground is sacred. The murmur of bushes, the rustle of invisible creatures. This is where they lived, seeking shelter beneath this overhang. Down the sides of the cliff and high above their heads they painted the animals they lived off. Later I write down the names: barramundi , the big fish; badjalanga , the long-necked turtle; kalekale , the catfish; budjudu , the iguana.
    ‘I’ve got to lie down,’ Almut says. ‘I’m getting a crick in my neck.’
    I lie beside her.
    ‘Too bad you can’t do this in the Sistine Chapel,’ she says, but I have already drifted off. I feel as if I am lying in a giant Mycenaean vase: imagined fish swimming downstream, the draughtsmanship of such delicacy, the tiny white figures beside it so humble, so faceless, as if to say they were not really there. The longer I look, the more I see that the cliff is composed of hundreds of colours. Weather, erosion, mould, time – everything has taken root in this stony surface, on top of which has been drawn an image of something that was real, a living reality, which had to be filtered through a person in order to be recreated in the colours of the earth, immovable, recorded, etched in time.
    I would like to say something, but I am not sure I can put it into words, something about what Almut just said, about time being a mere fart, but she is the only one who can say things like that. Whatever I blurt out sounds confused and stilted. ‘According to Cyril,’ I say, ‘these rock paintings are twenty thousand years old – a number that is no longer just a series of zeros, but something as tangible as the fabric, the weave, of the clothes on my back, so that what I see and what I am are in the same continuum, which does away with time like a conjuror’s cloth, abolishing it, declaring it null and void, turning it into an element like water or air, something that leaves you free to enter it wherever you are, not just in the direction where your part of it ends.’
    ‘Whoa! Slow down,’ Almut says, but by this time we have got up and walked to the lookout above the cliff. Below us the landscape stretches to the end of the visible world. It is a dream landscape, which ought to be filled with the figures of gods. A bird of prey hangs above it, motionless, as if it were its sole