He sat at his desk surrounded by a disorder of paper. Tiny piles skewed at odd angles to his vision moving towards a verge of books and a hillock of manuscripts. To one side of the desk, defining the only region of order was a bundle of palm leaf suttas, polished dark red planks sandwiching a concertina of parchment scriptures pillowed in the silk sheathes that wrapped them while not in use.
Paraffin lamps, glass cones piecing coloured cupolas, pooled shadows and ochre light about the border of papers. They stood either side of the desk, sentinels to the sheaf of paper before him upon which he scraped his thoughts. The neat spider script wove words through the grid of faint blue lines on the page, filling the space with a careful transcription of the thoughts and language of others in his refined schoolmaster English. He teetered on the edge of someone else’s ideas and absorbed them through his pen.
The desk nestled into a bay window that opened the room to the intrusion of night. Moonlight dappled on the leaves filtering the shadows across the porch and sifting the sound of the river as the tide turning raced itself to the sea, purling past the rocks and the piers of the nearby wharf in a gliss of water notes. The trees leaned into the skeletal light and shouldered the faint breath of night air stirring his sight from his work, out past the silhouette of English shrubs huddling in the lawn; out across the paddocks of Chartley and Blackwood Hills, names of English order among the straggling eucalypts and black wattle sheltering against the intrusion of ordered orchards of apple and pear, standing like the battalions of stunted Cornishmen who worked the nearby goldmines of Beaconsfield.
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