Even as the story of the coffee tin continued the Rock flared. A scarlet suffusion. As if, in the same way that a face changes colour, the source of the light was within. Had it given off heat one would not have been surprised. Nor if it had sweated or hummed. But it only glowed for two or three minutes, then started to brown. The sound of cameras going off was like distant musket fire.

Seconds before it was all over a death-grey jeep drove up and parked in the space left by the man who believed it wasn’t all it had been cracked up to be. It was around the need to forestall precisely such disappointment that the jeep driver had patently constructed his life – hence the colour of his jeep and the timing of his visit. This was he who shows up whenever the party is over, who scorns superfluity and conversation, and knows the precise moment that expectation turns to ashes. No post-Uluru tristesse for him. The last to arrive, he was very nearly, after one forlorn photograph, the first to leave. I noticed that the clothes he wore looked empty. As did, of course, his girlfriend’s. The merest round of flesh in the life of such a man would have left his system in ruins. I watched him drive out with an incommunicable expression of ghostly satisfaction on his features: once more he had got the better of what would otherwise have bettered him. By the time he was gone the last lick of flame had vanished from the Rock and it too suggested the extinction of all hope.

Later that evening we hit the town. ‘Across a thousand miles of severe and uncompromising desert the breeze travels,’ the brochure said, ‘before whispering into the splendour and magnificence of the Sheraton Ayers Rock Hotel.’ It seemed incumbent upon us to follow the breeze and go whispering into the Sheraton ourselves.