May I share two brief passages from my latest reading: Australian author/historian Inga Clendinnen's "Tiger's eye: a memoir":

p. 61
"It was a beautiful river, small -- four hours would see you to the source -- but with all the joys of a big one: soprano rapids, tenor waterfalls, baritone backwaters with water-boatmen clog-dancing and gumleaves waltzing. I'd heard no Mozart then, but now I think of it as a Mozartian river, it was so confident and shapely."

p. 284 [about birds, or could it be people?]
"Here everyone is a stranger. We meet, nod, pass on. They sometimes say where they came from, where they once had been. Some are eager to talk, others not. We don't remember what they say, or we get it wrong -- such things have no significance. We are not part of their story. They are local fauna: a colony of fluff-headed septuagenarians in flight from New Zealand's winter, a couple of stilt-legged Swedes, the sixty-year-old hippie in his draggled plumage stalking the beach."