Reminiscences of an Expedition | the long silence
an extract from my journal, written in a hut in the Victorian Alps.
Perhaps it is best that I reflect upon the previous night’s entry. Or rather, the lack of it. Torrential rainfall struck us after the noon rest over the highland plateau between Hotham and Feathertop, and caught us unawares. The low-flying larks should have been warning enough, their short and sculpted wings flashing between the last of the sunlight. Darkness descended like a fire. Soon the sun was gone altogether and all that remained was refracted, broken kind of afterthought that dispersed over the land, all the peat and heather bejewelled with the onyx gleam of sleet and ice. The wayfare poles, once our guides in this pathless stretch of bush, now bristled like the spinal-protrusions of some rumbling leviathan, which, awaken by the churn of the clouds, twists and rises in yearning response.
Oh! and what a woe that dire situation was. That alpine rain wedded together sky and earth, veiling the unlikely lovers so that their faces converged into one rumbling whole, with her the hailstorm setting rime into the hearts of all her children — the beasts, the wildflowers. In that heavy mist and mud the road before us transmuted. Flashes from another time overrode the path ahead. In the intermittent rain saw a primordial ocean expanding before my gaze, its brambles and heather rolling into waves. I saw a snowfield, a church’s spire jutting from the blizzard, the phantom song of a familiar choir ringing in my ear. Kyrie. They sang. Kyrie eleison. And as I stood motionless in that moment I heard the chorus of the moor sing back to me in the notes of lark song, in the croak of frogs, in the wuthering of the winds. I never finished my sketch of the land.
That night brought to the entire party joint pains and chills which sapped us of our solicitude, and a lunar eclipse which set the world into a bottomless well of ink. As the night froze, so our dreams froze with it. The storm stopped past midnight.
A brief reflection for a particular difficult moment in a hiking expedition in the Victorian Alpine National Park. My entire party was ill-prepared against severe sleet and hail, and a great amount of perseverance, compassion and grit was the price we paid for it. The entry was made a day later, beside a cabin campfire.
