I name you Sentinel - you, who have stood for millennia and will continue to stand enduring upon your one stout foot for millennia uncountable until the quagmire wade of snail-flesh and bullet-drop rainfall grind you to dust. I can see your wasted form reflected in a high mountain of similar noble bearing, plunging into the fragile, glass-like eternity of open air like a diver, earth clinging to your limbs and distorting them until all that is visible is a chunk of arched shoulder, a tucked-in head, the goose-flesh vertebra of a spine. Flakes of your bleached brown skin have excoriated and spirited away in a thousand directions, and chipped-clean wounds of grey muscle are baldly glaring at the sky. In the shallow lines of your featureless head verdegris clings like close-shaven hair, mingling darkly in the cavernous gorges which play about your under regions. For a moment I lose perspective and am lost within the ochre desert beneath your shoulder, wandering dry riverbeds bone-white, flowing into one another in meandering lines from a single crescent Nile atop a ridge, and below the rivers run like a starburst branded into your thigh. My sojourn is not over. At once the starburst rips itself from the desert floor and pummels the sky, rivers flooding lithely around a serpentine body, an ivory frill bursting from the neck and a minute head shining fiercely with green eyes. We fly into a forest of dirty, mired trees. The ground has turned to black powder in the absence of water. The hunched trees, so much like beggars with gnarled fingers outreaching, fall inward upon themselves in heavy clouds of dark green dust, hollow and crippled by touch. This waterless swamp is cut by a labyrinth of ploughed lines, testament to the passing of long dead leviathans who shambled through in happier times. I continue west - west if the omnidirectional world of the rock could be given bearing, and I come across a black ocean turned to sand, cut deep with ravines which glisten as my every footfall causes an avalanche of granules, tumbling over one another in a continuous wave as though some flat and furtive animal were retreating into the depths. I cross this perpendicular facet of the Sentinel and slowly the ground revolves until I am a needlepoint perpendicular to the ground, an axis to a rough-hewn globe at the base of the Sentinel's spine. Dusk is falling, birds are in chorus to the song of city traffic, singing lullabies to one another in whoops, chirrups and twitters. If the rock-painted world of the Sentinel has a moon, this orbital cratered in a sheathe of stone is it, glowing brightly with reflections of a tempestuous element it refuses to know completely. The Sentinel is weeping now. Its high shoulder blade has been gored and a black stain seeps from the cradle by its thick neck, running down to where it makes war with the skeletal river-dragon, who dives up, emblazoned upon the Sentinel’s chest as a being of flashing limbs and sanguineous combat. At once the sentinel despairs, shade-cloaked, ghostly hands perched upon its down-turned head like feasting wraiths. Silently he asks, “Will I ever return to earth’s embrace? Or will I float here in this chilling air, locked in eternity, shrinking ever smaller and watching the world grow past unfathomable proportions?” How does one comfort a stone? As my eyes fail in the deepening murk of light I break my vigil for a moment to pour electric fire into the icy abyss. The Sentinel responds at once through the phantasmal doppelganger projected on the glass between us. Its spine is blasted into definition, and every scar is made visible in an intersecting constellation. At once the world of the Sentinel erupts in a shower of white-hot magma to become a universe of starless chasms and dusty nebula, the auroral outline of its arched back bordered by a void unknowing. I see its eye, a pinprick in a wide oval, as shocked as I am to see it staring. Before the Sentinel was full, hard and solid with close-knit particles. Now it has let down its guard and the flesh of the rock falls away. Its marrow remains – those bony vertices shine like the fringe-geometry of a diamond, and like a diamond they are similarly hollowed, invisible against the fossilised remains of the creature coming to life before my eyes. It is a dinosaur, head slavishly bowed with grinning jowls grazing the floor, a twisting stem of short and long limbs bent in jaunty motion as it slinks around, every time I look at it a new feature despoils the last and it moves every reflection in the window is as startling as a villain whose appearance has contributed to the reptilian Sentinel’s sudden dance. It is suddenly free to meet the tidal beat of the city, free from the acute scrutiny of the sun’s glare, free in the questionable and permissive possibilities of night. I close my eyes and let it walk where it wills, unwilling to chain it in place with suggestive bindings of scientific reality.
When I look again, It has resumed its rigid pose as a diver, glowing gold in the morning light. The seasoning of green clustered beneath every overhang of flaky rock appears luminous, be telling of wilder times when jungles rather than gardens were held in the Sentinel’s aura. Now it is bare-faced. Sheer and magnificent sediment thrusting up from a docile matrix of purple-stemmed leaves and lazy fronds, its tip crowned by the orange crests of blade-beaked clivias. The constellations which had shone so brightly last night have faded, retreated back to their true form as shaved abrasions, tan on brown cut by the occasional giraffe-print of black grime. I ponder the Sentinel’s umbral transformation, and see the disconnected and fracturous images of the being who has now retreated into an earthy cocoon. I move, sundering my two-dimensional reality in a need to find knew ways to define the Sentinel. On the far side of its spine a sheer diagonal ramp cuts an ascent from the floor, routinely marred by thick ridges of stone bent upwards like discomfited scales. Colours contrast sharply here, black rock against avian excrement, bleached ridges, a floral fungus curled like an unliving flower in the shade. There are no stories here. My eyes refuse to find purchase safely in soil and dirt, ever a tomb for the inanimate and unfeeling. Perhaps the Sentinel is free to tunnel through these dark places, becoming a dream creature once again until distant times when it is scoured and surfaced completely, like the distant moon categorised into set phases and harried by all. I hope it is so. Half an incarceration may dull its eternity. Shadows flutter across its back and solar effusions creep along slowly, burrowing into its thick carapace with futile designs to conquer the stunning cold at its centre. I touch the rough exterior and the texture is like sandpaper as cold as glass, the friction is powerful, holding me in place where I can see minute featherings of moss thicker than I had thought, so they truly are swathes of hairy jungle bound upon a crumpled map. The shadows are held in a similar fashion, falling into the dips and bowls of the rockface and hanging there like delicate bats. This thing – this Sentinel I name lifeless – is in itself an inspiration to life, its craters fill up with it and overflow, spilling imagined dimensions across its whole self until its self is lost and no longer. It becomes a world, it is possibility and yet a manifestation of the improbable. Every vertex has a unique geography, every clef swarms with bacterial life.
