shadowy twilight

?In the beginning the Earth was an infinite and murky plain, separated from the sky and from the grey salt sea and smothered in a shadowy twilight. There were neither Sun nor Moon nor Stars. . . .

Beneath the Earth?s crust, however, the constellations glimmered, the Sun shone, the Moon waxed and waned, and all the forms of life lay sleeping: the scarlet of a desert-pea, the iridescence on a butterfly?s wing, the twitching white whiskers of Old Man Kangaroo?dormant as seeds in the desert that must wait for a wandering shower.?

?Bruce Chatwin, from The Songlines, 1987.