they see the plateau of red-bed sand deposition chopped, cut back
to cliffs that butt the torrenting, the wet that
thunders at the bedded rocks banded white and red and the rim of
beach where day after day men fling, hurl, they
cast into the deep to hook what they can, a tailor, or a mullaway, a
silver bream, they cast, and they
reel, they cast:
they see to the north of the mouth of the Murchison the high cliffs,
the steep scree-stone cliffs, the long lip of cliffs
where the Eneabba Plain ends, stops dead, that stopped the Zuytdorp
bound for Batavia, Marinus Wijsvliet, captain,
with two hundred and fifty passengers and two hundred and forty eight
thousand silver guilders, and there were they cast:
they see to the south the parade of scarp and crag and cliff and ledge
that prongs and it gaps, it cracks, faults, slopes
into the breaking of sea that rasps as it grinds, shattering, snatching,
and they see the boulders lobbed and tossed
by the breaking, pitched, and flung, thrown aside, bowled for the
hell of it, chucked as dice, bones that are cast:
they see as they walk on the plateau of the bluff the tracks caught in
stone, once sediment, of a eurypterid sea scorpion
and they see the prints of their boots and trainers and thongs in the
thin red-brown sand and they see the shadows of
their coming and going that dog and hug, shadows of being, blanks
of unbeing, players of the other, default, cast:
this the lookout where people stop to see what is to be seen and they see and they go, they go