The stranger, wond’ring, stalks, and stares upon
Rome’s antique glories, in her ruins seen;
He sees high arches, huge shining heaps of stone,
Maim’d, mutil’d, murder’d, by years’ wasteful teen:
He sees a rugged, ragged, rocky quarr
Hang in the air, with ivy laced about.
O! what can last, alas! (then cries he out)
Sith Time hath conquer’d the world’s conqueror?
“The clouds passed, in phrases and paragraphs, like incomprehensible messages of troubling import, overhead across the forested ridges, above the unsealed cliffs, beyond the uninhabited fields of lonely mesas, followed by their faithful shadows flowing with effortless adaptation over each crack, crevice, crease and crag on the wrinkled skin of the Utahn earth.”
Edward Abbey | The Monkey Wrench Gang