If I had to imagine how to walk on the moon,” I thought, “it would be like walking on the land of Uluru .” The hard and the soft, the constancy and the change. Steps suspended in absolute silence on earth that looks like sand. I bend down to touch it, take a handful and under the red surface, it turns gray. The colors are still dark, there are only four, red and black, the first colors of the world, the sage green of spinifex bushes that draw grass rings on the flat earth, and the changing sky.
There in the east it is clearing. I’m standing with my feet firmly planted on the ground. An Aboriginal once told me: “They took everything from us, but as long as we have land we have everything . ” And here, at the origin of the world, I understand why. Stop, in a magic circle with the stars above, the infinite horizon around and the strength and heart of the planet under my feet.
Then in the uniform yellow horizon a beginning of redness marks the point where the day will decide to attest its presence. Then it rises lazily like a clear ball. It is the inevitability of the day, the certainty of life. The absolute strength. Light enters the eyes flat and conquers them in a total way, with a power that cannot be avoided. It is dawn at Uluru, the great sacred monolith in the heart of Australia .
For this dawn – which before arriving here I thought was the classic story shared with dozens of tourists with cameras – it is worthwhile to come up to here, it is really worth taking a flight from Italy, then another, and yet another, to descend and rush here, to an unknown place in the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park , and wait for the oldest miracle to take place on the oldest land.