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her as something she had lost; but he had no such thing to lose. He had so little, in fact, that he could not even be bothered to crawl painfully to his truck, to radio for the ambulance. By turning his head he could see the outline of the bumper, the dent in the metal from where he’d hit a pole, parking, a little drunk. No, it really didn’t matter. Inside the house was empty. One bed still made. One not. Photos still in their dusty place. He could not grit his teeth if he tried.
    But.
    But.
    But what, he thought dimly, the sound of an ambulance not yet reaching his ears, what if that deranged girl was right, what if, through simple force of belief, you could change the world around you?
    What then?
Or So His Letter Said.

The Dreaming City
1895.
    In his dreams, he had always been Mark Twain; awake, he had always been Samuel Clemens.
    It had been so since the day he had first used the pseudonym. At first, he thought of it as a warning, but the first dreams had been sweet like the Missouri summers of his childhood, before his father’s death. There was a rare quality to them, and he awoke refreshed and invigorated and filled with the kind of joy that not even the most vivid memory of his childhood years could supply; of course, as time continued, not all the dreams of Mark Twain had been so pleasant, but even the nightmares provided him with a substance that nothing in the waking world could provide him.
    And now, at sixty, asleep in the White Horse Motel in Sydney, the small, grey haired man no longer felt the slightest sense of warning as he dreamed.
    It was natural, normal, as familiar as the shape of his hands. It simply
was
.
    Mark Twain dreamed:
    He stood on the wooden, creaking docks of Sydney Harbour. It was early evening, and the sky had been splattered with leaking orange paint, while in front of him was an ocean of closely packed, swaying hulks: rotting old troop transports and men-o-wars, their masts and rigging stripped away, the remaining wooden shells turned into floating prisons that had, one hundred years ago, marred the Thames in a cultural plague.
1788.
    The Eora watched the arrival of the First Fleet from the shores of the Harbour, and were told by the Elders that they had nothing to fear from the great ships: they held the spirits of their ancestors, reborn in fragile white skin. In response, the Eora questioned and argued, but the truth, the Elders said, was inescapable.
    Look closely
, they whispered,
and you will recognize the members of your family.
    But how?
the Eora demanded with one voice.
How can this be true?
    The Elders never hesitated with their response:
They have sailed out of the Spirit World itself.
Introduction to
A Walking Tour Through the Dreaming City
.
    The Harbour has never been a welcoming birth for immigrants. Since the day the English landed and changed its name from Cadi to Sydney Harbour, this has been the case. The cultural wars that have been fought along its banks and throughout Sydney’s streets for over two hundred years have left their mark on the heart of our great beast, and the signpost for this is the Harbour. Yet strangely, the literary acknowledgement of the Harbour’s significance does not begin in the journals of the naval captains who arrived with convicts, or in the diaries of the Irish or Chinese, but in this book you are holding now, Mark Twain’s
A Walking Tour Through The Dreaming City:
    ‘Sydney Harbour is shut behind a precipice that extends some miles like a wall, and exhibits no break to the ignorant stranger. It has a break in the middle, but it makes so little show that even Captain Cook sailed by without seeing it. Near by that break is a false break which resembles it, and which used to make trouble for the mariner at night, in the early days before the place was lighted. Any stranger approaching Sydney is advised to take heed as the entrance is the only warning the city will offer on its nature; that it is filled with false hope and false