big red

Ayer's Rock, or Uluru, is the iconic image of Australia's outback, and possibly of the country as a whole.
You see pictures of it in every shop, in every travel book. I don't know when I first saw a picture of the Rock, but I'm sure it was when I was a kid in some book. The point is, just about everyone knows what it looks like, even those people who haven't thought about traveling to this side of the world.
But the thing is, they're wrong.
I was a bit worried seeing the Rock would be like seeing Mt. Rushmore. You see all the pictures of Mt. Rushmore, and then you get there, and it looks exactly like the pictures. So much so that the actual Mt. Rushmore is less impressive than a picture of Mt. Rushmore - the real thing has nothing extra to offer.
Uluru is nothing like that.
For one thing, when you see the pictures, you don't notice or can't see the texture of the thing, the ancient weathering scars and pockmarks. You don't realize how many different views there are, depending where you look from. You don't see just how it looms over the flat red desert. You don't have a sense of just how much texture the rock has, or how the color changes throughout the day with the sun's movement. You don't get to see how it appears more than anything to be a painted backdrop as you drive toward it, until the moment where it suddenly becomes very much three-dimensional.
You don't get to feel the heat and dust of the dry desert air and the sun's unceasing glare as you walk around the base of the rock, or the silence.
You don't realize how each curve, each protrusion, each cut, each indentation has it's own character. You don't realize how when you're close up to the Rock, each spot, each nook seems to have its own special character, at once separated and a part of the whole.
You don't get lost in the unreal contrast and edge where the deep, deep red meets the endless deep blue of the sky; you don't see the sharp edge where rock and sky push against each other, or the soft touch of green the trees provide. You don't feel how the colors, the texture, the silence, the massiveness of it all seem to give the Rock an ageless feeling.
You don't see the difference in the rock itself, how parts of it are curved and raked smooth by eons of wind and sand, or how other parts are jagged or just missing where boulders have fallen off. You don't see the place where the red stone seems to drip onto a grey exposed patch like candle wax.
Most of all, you don't get the sense of Uluru having been here for much longer than you can imagine, of how insignificant and out-of-place the tourists walking up one of its ridges look, of how it seems to exude a quiet presence.