“That is not cruelty,” he said. “That is the rinse cycle.”
A young woman, a climate scientist from a university in Melbourne, had once come to sit on this very cliff. She had looked at his data—his temperatures, his rainfall totals, his shifting ENSO patterns—and called him “unhinged.” “Polarized,” she said. “Getting hotter. Drier at the edges. Wetter in the middle. More violent.” climate of australia
“They want predictability,” he grumbled, shaking his head. “I am not a clock. I am a drum. Sometimes I beat slow. Sometimes I beat fast. Sometimes I stop, and the silence is the most terrifying sound of all.” “That is not cruelty,” he said
He turned his gaze south and west. To the great, hollowed heart. To the place where the Tjurrma —the cold, dry silence of the desert night—would crack the very stones. His other hand tightened. The sand trickled out. “Getting hotter
And with that, the old man who was the Climate of Australia dissolved into his elements. A wisp of cloud, a shimmer of heat haze, the scent of eucalyptus oil, and the distant roar of a bushfire just beginning its spring campaign.