The fast one is the daily alternation between dark and light, which repeats every 24 hours, and the slow one is the yearly alternation between winter and summer, which has a repeat time of a little over 365 days. Not surprisingly, both rhythms have spawned myths. The day–night cycle especially is rich in myth because of the dramatic way the sun seems to move from east to west. Several peoples even saw the sun as a golden chariot, driven by a god across the sky. The aboriginal peoples of Australia were isolated on their island continent for at least 40,000 years, and they have some of the oldest myths in the world. These are mostly set in a mysterious age called the Dreamtime, when the world began and was peopled by animals and a race of giant ancestors. Different tribes of aborigines have different myths of the Dreamtime. This first one comes from a tribe who live in the Flinders Ranges of southern Australia. During the Dreamtime, two lizards were friends. One was a goanna (the Australian name for a large monitor lizard) and the other a gecko (a delightful little lizard with suction pads on its feet, with which it climbs up vertical surfaces).
