There was then, on the temple mount, the temple dogs barking the warnings that had frightened and impressed generations of primitives, those before the world transformed, the species transformed, before all was split asunder, before the ravishing, before the country called Australia destroyed itself, became the world's laughing stock, before it became a prison island, before the peasants starved to death on the roads of disaster; before all that, when the ancient technologies and ancient lifeforms merged to create a new kind of divinity.