Old Light

I heard a tale that the sun god was said to live in a whale and that’s why light seems to come out of its eyes and why rainbows form in the mist of the gray whale’s breath. It’s true, light comes, but it is an old light, seeing. They look. The way they lift themselves from the sea: they are shining, water falling from them as they rise, exhale, inhale and return below the surface of the water.

The gray whales themselves are an intelligence we haven’t yet grasped (1), Life covered with several hundred pounds of barnacles and small-eyed. If we could see them (2) ________ the brief timescale of the planet, they would look like shape-shifters (5). If we thought of time by something other than our own notions, million-fold years ago, before our own knowledge of evolution, we’d see these whales ________. they walked on land. Even now, existing within their immense bones, there is body evidence, a hand, human; vestigial hipbones; and remnants of legs they no longer need. They lived ________. land when we lived in water. When we look at them we see our own future.

And when they come up again for air and the water falls from them back into the seawater (3), it is a shine of beauty in a world of desert, dunes in the background. As their hind legs have disappeared into them, out of our sight, and their hands have become hidden, the compass set into their brains (6), you’d think you might be able to (7) be one with them, as with a cousin, but it’s a cousin lost in time. It makes us so small in the firmament. It makes us remember something we can’t quite name, only feel.

Looking at these whales in the shallow water, thinking of the great turn of evolution and change on earth, we wonder if one day we will return to the seawater (4), along with these long-enduring, longest-living mammals on Earth.

(Adaptado de: HOGAN, Linda. Sightings: The Gray Whales’ Mysterious Journey. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2002. p. 29-30.)

Assinale a alternativa que preenche, correta e respectivamente, as lacunas.