A Quiet Between Walls

Morning light set the walls of Glen Helen Gorge alight, red stone doubled in the waterhole beneath a deep blue sky. Nothing moved. The reflection lay as sharp as the rock above it.
We had come from Uluru, a long drive through country that runs flat and red to the horizon in every direction. Out here the distances empty themselves of everything but land and sky. We arrived after dark.
So my first meeting with this place was by starlight. I stood in the blackness that night photographing the sky as it turned above the gorge, knowing the walls only as shapes against the stars. Daylight came as a surprise: the silhouettes of the night before stood revealed in red.
The waterhole below them is permanent, a rare thing in this dry country. The ranges part here for the Finke River, which some call the oldest river in the world. Whatever the truth of that, water, rock, and sky have been meeting in this place for longer than the mind can follow.
As an Australian, I felt at home in all of it: the red of the stone, a blue that visitors tell me belongs to our sky alone, and the deep hush of being far from everything. That hush is what I remember first, and what the photograph returns to me now.
The panorama runs the walls wide, one red rampart answering the other, the water carrying their colour between them. And in the middle of all that stone and sky, a quiet that stays.