Looking for … goodness knows quite what

Tags

BIM mélange, Smugglers Cove, uncertainty

And more particularly quite where. 

We think we’ve struck gold when we find “Field geology of NSW” by Branagan and Packham, and use it to shape a Sunday explore in search of aspects of Narooma Terrane (aka Narooma Accretionary Complex) that we haven’t been aware of before. Specifically, we’re hunting for BIM mélange. Wikipedia provides us with a photo (no scale) and some basic information. I’m most struck by the fact that this mélange probably rode the Pacific tectonic plate at least part of its 2500 km journey towards the east coast of Gondwana some considerable time ago. 

At this point we have a vague unformed idea of what we’re looking for. The next thing we need to know is where to find it. And that’s when local knowledge and the handbook come to the parting of the ways. We know exactly where pillow lava is, one of our few certainties in this geology game. But the headland nomenclature, always a bit shaky, doesn’t match. We follow written directions like good little students and although we find fascinating rockfaces that raise another lot of questions (Does that look like chert? Do you reckon this could be basalt? Is this side of this headland the same as the other side, only differently weathered?) we don’t find any sign of the imbricate stack. So we go a couple of beaches south to the patch of known pillow lava, and poke around muttering imprecations and mumbling interrogatively. We scurry around a headland between waves, and find what we’re looking for in Smugglers Cove.

Mind you, we were looking for a neat imbricate stack (don’t ask!), but we find BIM mélange that perfectly matches the Wikipedia photo (the first in the pairing below), the bottom layer of the imbricate stack sequence – if we’ve got it right. We give ourselves 50% for the morning’s work, and head home sun-soaked and weary.

What exactly is block in matrix mélange? As I search for an easy definition I’m back in the realm of every second word a mystery that needs to be solved. Breccia, tectonic accretionary prisms, olistostromal action, orogeny, boudinage, dilational veins, mylonite, imbricate stack. Talk about an accretionary zone in vocabularics! It’s a relief to meet a few old familiars, even if I’m not completely certain of their meaning: Lachlan Fold Belt, subduction, turbidites, chert. They’re like old friends spotted at a party filled with strangers.

Oh, and BIM mélange? A sedimentary deposit composed of a chaotic mass of mixed material turned to stone. I think.

Postcards from the past: Siwa, Egypt

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Siwa Oasis

Tuesday, January 13th, 1998

We travel to the Siwa oasis, first in a service taxi from Cairo to Alexandria – an hour’s wait till it was full – and then in a rattletrap of a bus along the Mediterranean coast. We drive through rain and desolation: thorn trees, desert and half-started, half-finished, half-ruined houses. We are the only foreigners. 

Our balcony looks down over the village square towards Shali. I watch little kids rolling tyres along like hoops: endless donkey carts piled high with long greens or tied-up palm leaves, a tented woman getting off the afternoon bus accompanied by a shawled man. Soldiers carry plastic bags full of oranges. Three men discuss a wad of money at length. A crowd gathers around a truck, buying goats and sheep: a reluctant horned one is being pushed and shoved along by its new owners. An old man sits cross-legged in the sun sorting dates, nudging them with a dusty toe. I can see down into rooftops too: women, uncovered, pegging out the washing; dates drying; quirls of bicycle tyres; a shelf with cages for ducks. Wide cracks snake down some of the mud brick walls.

I wake to the call to prayer, a hoarse amplified chant in the morning silence. Then the roosters, a truck starting up, the peaceful cooing of pigeons. My daughter rolls over and the bed squeaks and crashes metalically. Then a choking gasping for breath: the laughing braying of a donkey.

I walk out into the crisp morning: the sound of the wind against my ears, a ute driving beside the palm grove, the creak of a cart, voices. A couple of birds wade in the lake. Children are heading off to school and I follow them: two little boys say eagerly “Gotta ben?” (pen). Women in black cluster, chatting as women do everywhere as they see their kids off. Fences beside the path are interwoven palm fronds; the water in the ditches is very clear with little fish swimming around;  the donkey shit a rich iridescent purple. I encounter placid donkeys tied to poles, and an aggressive turkey. A lad setting up a stall of pickled  olives says “Welcome to Siwa” with a big smile. Young men on bikes wheel past on the way to work, carrying thick sticks and machetes.

 I plod off towards the temple of Amun, in the steps of Alexander, who came here seeking an oracle. It isn’t far, but it’s hot. Scaling the hill looks impossible, but I circumambulate it and find the desired track – and an undesired guide whom I finally pay not to guide me. The building is partly huge blocks of stone, partly mud brick, a lot of it tumbledown or propped up with scaffolding. The view from any high place in this desert is spectacular. I’m looking down on the top of palm trees across a lake and out to a tabletop hill. In another direction the view is interrupted by the blocky minaret, no longer safe to climb, and slabs of wall. As I return I run into a heap of tourists heading where once was solitude. 

That night we eat out and watch Siwa by night. Donkey carts creak past, on one a shrouded woman: a huge green truck rumbles by: kids gather round a communal TV or play table tennis or queue at a stall where a man is stuffing torpedo shaped rolls with something from a pan balanced on a gas burner. A tall good-looking man approaches us with an album of photos from a desert safari, hoping we’ll be tempted. Another man, this one wearing a tattered grimy robe, begins ceremonially shaking hands with everyone till he is hustled away by the owner. After we’ve eaten we walk along a dark puddly lane through an arched door into a cavernous room to buy breakfast bread , which is counted out and handed over in a speckled pile.

It is full moon, and my daughter and I walk into the ancient mud brick town of Shali, along narrow streets with towering ruins above them. As we sit and talk at the foot of crumbling walls, a flock of birds flies over, catching the white light of the moon and blessing our time in Siwa.

Postcards from the past: Cairo museum

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Cairo markets, Cairo museum, Postcards from the past

January, 1998

The Cairo Museum is just around the corner from my daughter’s apartment. En route, we pass many men with guns, a response to the recent Luxor massacre. I spend most of my first visit downstairs amongst porphyry, marble and granite … statues, sarcophagi and goblets … white and grey and brown and huge. My liking for smaller things asserts itself: flint knives; pots and beads; cuneiform tablets with the delicacy of their massed script, the clay envelopes, and the matter-of-factness of their inscriptions: “My daughter is now old enough to marry. Before, you sent my servant back with a pretty good present fast. Now it’s time to claim my daughter.” These things are more manageable than statues and columns.

I leave the basement and walk up an immense flight of marble stairs, past framed papyrus, to the golden beds of Tutankhamen. There are Carter’s photos at the opening of the tomb, and I am in the presence of the treasures he unearthed, familiar from my adolescent interest: the gold shrines, the inlaid box for clothes, the box of canopic jars, the gold and jewelled throne.

It’s Ramadan and museum closes at early. No polite requests to leave or bells ringing here: guards herd people out by clapping their hands.

When I return to the museum, daringly alone, I begin my explorations in a dingy gallery of mummiform coffins, space shared with electric fans on shopping trolleys. My eye is caught by clothing – sandals; linen robes belonging to a priestess; and food – bread and biscuits. I take in the dioramas of life in the 16th Dynasty: women weaving linen; men counting cattle; soldiers; boatmen. I revisit the Tutankhamen gallery where all the small stuff is luxuriantly displayed. The mummy jewellery is laid out as it would be in the layers of wrappings. There is a helpful guard who hurtles me from exhibit to exhibit, until I sit on the floor stubbornly and begin copying hieroglyphics from a wooden sarcophagus. It works and I’m left in peace to wander. I stand for a long time in front of my favourite item: Tutankhamen’s ecclesiastical chair, with its duck legs and subtle richness of design and colour.

We spend the afternoon in the market. There is mania in the air: men dance on tables, turning prices into rap, accompanied by rhythmic banging on a 44 gallon drum; sellers rip T-shirts out of plastic wrap and hurl them towards the crowd. We buy macaroni out of a big hessian sack and finally reach the street of tentmakers where carpets are unrolled and spread out for us. We don’t buy.

After pasta and packing we catch a taxi to the station en route to Luxor. I almost guillotine my daughter, knock the mirror on another car askew and squash my hot sweet potato between my fingers. My daughter swears none of this would happen if I travelled  light.

Drinking the rainbow

Tags

Durras, mosaics, toilet block art, vibrant

For this week's wordpress challenge “vibrant” is the theme and its epigraph is a quote from Khalil Gibran:

Let me swallow the sunset and drink the rainbow

Three king parrots offered their vibrant green and red briefly outside my living room window, but I wasn't fast enough to capture them.

Mosaics on toilet blocks are much easier to sieze photographically. This collage consists of fragments of Durras rising, 2014, a pair of mosaics designed by Moira Christie depicting Durras Beach by day and night.

 

 

 

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Thursday’s special …

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Mt Napier, reluctance

And especially so since Paula is back from extended absence from blogging. Today's challenge asks for something that changed the original aspect of a place.

Recently, on a steamy afternoon, my companion insisted I accompany him to the top of a mountain. I set off, grumbling to myself emphatically “I don't want to do this. I DON'T WANT TO DO THIS!”

The path was no incentive. Dense shoulder high thistles curved over it, threatening maybe-snakes, maybe-tripping-over. J is much fitter than me, and he was soon out of sight. I persevered. At a rest stop I heard a sound like a two-stroke engine starting up, and began to feel a bit mellower even though I couldn't spot the koala making this strange sound.

The path became wider – and steeper, but somehow this didn't matter anymore. When I finally reached the trig station at the top I had a panoramic view out over country we'd been traversing for the last few days, and a chance to sit and soak it up. Suddenly thistles seemed insignificant.

 

 

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Bench series: August

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colourful benches, Narooma

Here's a colourful bench, to join the rest in Jude's bench collection. There are a number of such benches newly scattered around Narooma, and always in the company of a more traditional bench. I'm wondering if there's a meaning or a function I'm missing. The view is wonderful, out over the inlet to the curves of the coastline, and north towards my village.

 

 

 

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A wooden bench with a view

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Baranguba, Dalmeny Beach

For more benches from around the world visit Jude's bench challenge: https://smallbluegreenwords.wordpress.com/bench-series/

 

I don't often participate in challenges. I have enough obsessions to overcome, without adding another one. But when I saw this bench, at the end of March (wooden benches) and on the cusp of April (benches with a view) I decided I had no choice. It's perched on a headland on the south end of Dalmeny Beach in southern NSW, looking out over mown grass and coastal rosemary to Baranguba, a lighthouse island 7 kilometres away where there are colonies of seals and penguins and breeding grounds for shearwaters, seagulls and terns.

If you want to visit the island, join me at https://morselsandscraps3.wordpress.com/2014/10/07/to-the-island/

 

 

 

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