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It is exactly what you expected it to be. You know this rock. You know it in a way that has nothing to do with calendars and the covers of souvenir books. Your knowledge of this rock is grounded in something much more elemental. In some odd way that you don’t understand and can’t begin to articulate you feel an acquaintance with it—a familiarity on an unfamiliar level. Somewhere in the deep sediment of your being some long-dormant fragment of primordial memory, some little severed tail of DNA, has twitched or stirred. It is a motion much too faint to be understood or interpreted, but somehow you feel certain that this large, brooding, hypnotic presence has an importance to you at the species level—perhaps even at a sort of tadpole level—and that in some way your visit here is more than happenstance. I’m not saying that any of this is so. I’m just saying that this is how you feel. The other thought that strikes you—that struck me anyway—is that Uluru is not merely a very splendid and mighty monolith but also an extremely distinctive one. More than this, it is an extremely recognizable one—very possibly the most immediately recognizable natural object on earth. I’m suggesting nothing here, but I will say that if you were an intergalactic traveler who had broken down in our solar system, the obvious directions to rescuers would be: “Go to the third planet and fly around till you see the big red rock. You can’t miss it.” If ever on earth they dig up a 150,000-year-old rocket ship from the galaxy Zog, this is where it will be.
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