Physical geography

"[T]he Sahara was a spectacle as alive as the sea. The tints of the dunes changed according to the time of day and the angle of the light: golden as apricots from far off, when we drove close to them they turned to freshly made butter; behind us they grew pink; from sand to rock, the materials of which the desert was made varied as much as its tints."

"The gods of the valley are not the gods of the hills, and you shall understand it."

"A hill is a transitional accommodation to stress, and ego may be a similar accommodation."

"Run to the hills, run for your lives."

"There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling."

"In the late 1800s, Europe had a peaceable bull’s-eye in the northern industrialized countries (Great Britain, France, Germany, Denmark, and the Low Countries), bordered by slightly stroppier Ireland, Austria-Hungary, and Finland, surrounded in turn by still more violent Spain, Italy, Greece, and the Slavic countries. Today the peaceable center has swelled to encompass all of Western and Central Europe, but a gradient of lawlessness extending to Eastern Europe and the mountainous Balkans is still visible. There are gradients within each of these countries as well: the hinterlands and mountains remained violent long after the urbanized and densely farmed centers had calmed down. Clan warfare was endemic to the Scottish highlands until the 18th century, and to Sardinia, Sicily, Montenegro, and other parts of the Balkans until the 20th. It’s no coincidence that the two blood-soaked classics with which I began this book—the Hebrew Bible and the Homeric poems—came from peoples that lived in rugged hills and valleys."

"I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can rest only for a moment, for with freedom comes responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not yet ended."

"On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects."

"I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and earth."

"An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome. There was something in the old power of architecture, which it had from the recluse more than from the citizen."

"You know you're over the hill when the hill is over you."

"It is a costly thing living here to fight the erosion. The sea is constantly threatening to cut into the coastline and sweep all this away. Every year we have to haul stones up here to repair the damage and plug the holes. It's a full-time job."

"The character of our coasts, remarkable in considerable parts of it for admitting no vessels of size to pass near the shores, would entitle us, in reason, to as broad a margin of protected navigation, as any nation whatever. Not proposing, however, at this time, and without a respectful and friendly communication with the Powers interested in this navigation, to fix on a distance to which we may ultimately insist on the right of protection, the President gives instructions to the officers, acting under this authority, to consider those heretofore given them as restrained for the present to the distance of one sea-league, or three geographical miles from the sea-shore. This distance can admit of no opposition as it is recognized by treaties between some of the Powers with whom we are connected in commerce and navigation, and is as little or less than is claimed by any of them on their own coasts."

"The brilliance of Midwestern California, the California that is founded upon discontent, and the reason why so much technological innovation springs from the West Coast, is that having confronted the finitude of the coastline, technologists in Silicon Valley have shrunk the needed commodity—the future (thousands of miles of Zen pathway)—to the size of a fleck of gold dust, to a microchip."

"A story I will tell you of the salty fisherman, Of all the little rivers and inlets of the coast, He seems to like Pender Harbour to bum around the most."

"Growing up in such a stunning landscape is inevitably going to have an effect on you, whether you rebel or whether you embrace, because it's so striking. I lived on this rugged, rugged coastline with the North Sea hammering at the cliffs, and the weather changes literally every half hour. My parents met as rock climbers, so they're absolute outdoors fiends, and we were constantly up hills and under canvas and camping and tramping around. They're very fond memories and something I still love to do."

"It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours: the desert of the real itself."

"The apocalypse is finished, today it is the precession of the neutral, of forms of the neutral and of indifference. I will leave it to be considered whether there can be a romanticism, an aesthetic of the neutral therein. I don't think so — all that remains, is the fascination for desertlike and indifferent forms, for the very operation of the system that annihilates us."

"I think you are another of these desert-loving English: Doughty, Stanhope, Gordon of Khartoum. No Arab loves the desert. We love water and green trees, there is nothing in the desert. No man needs nothing."

"I've been through the desert on a horse with no name It felt good to be out of the rain. In the desert you can remember your name 'Cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain."

"After nine days I let the horse run free 'Cause the desert had turned to sea. There were plants and birds and rocks and things, There was sand and hills and rings. The ocean is a desert with its life underground, And a perfect disguise above. Under the cities lies a heart made of ground, But the humans will give no love."

""I’ve crossed these sands many times," said one of the camel drivers one night. "But the desert is so huge, and the horizon so distant, that they make a person feel small, and as if he should remain silent." The boy intuitively knew what he meant, even without having ever set foot in the desert before. Whenever he saw the sea, or a fire, he fell silent, impressed by their elemental force. I’ve learned things from the sheep, and I’ve learned things from crystal, he thought. I can learn something from the desert, too. It seems old and wise."

"Once you get into the desert, there’s no going back," said the camel driver. "and, when you can’t go back, you have to worry only about the best way of moving forward. The rest is up to Allah, including the danger."

"The desert takes our dreams away from us, and they don't always return. We know that, and we are used to it. Those who don't return become a part of the clouds, a part of the animals that hide in the ravines and of the water that comes from the earth. They become part of everything … They become the Soul of the World."

"You neglect and belittle the desert. The desert is not remote in southern tropics The desert is not only around the corner, The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you, The desert is in the heart of your brother."

"Polish comes from the cities; wisdom from the desert."

"The wilderness and the parched land will exult, and the desert plain will be joyful and blossom as the saffron. Without fail it will blossom; it will rejoice and shout for joy. The glory of Lebanon will be given to it, the splendor of Carmel and of Sharon. They will see the glory of Jehovah, the splendor of our God. At that time the eyes of the blind will be opened, and the ears of the deaf will be unstopped. At that time the lame will leap like the deer, and the tongue of the speechless will shout for joy. For waters will burst forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert plain. The heat-parched ground will become a reedy pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water. In the lairs where jackals rested, there will be green grass and reeds and papyrus."

"Inhuman solitude made of sand and God. Surely only two kinds of people can bear to live in such desert: lunatics and prophets. The mind topples here not from fright but from sacred awe; sometimes it collapses downward, losing human stability, sometimes it springs upward, enters heaven, sees God face to face, touches the hem of His blazing garment without being burned, hears what He says, and taking this, slings it into men's consciousness. Only in the desert do we see the birth of these fierce, indomitable souls who rise up in rebellion even against God himself and stand before Him fearlessly, their minds in resplendent consubstantiality with the skirts of the Lord. God sees them and is proud, because in them his breath has not vented its force; in them, God has not stooped to becoming a man."

"Arabs felt no incongruity in bringing God into the weaknesses and appetites of their least creditable causes. He was the most familiar of their words; and indeed we lost much eloquence when making Him the shortest and ugliest of our monosyllables. This creed of the desert seemed inexpressible in words, and indeed in thought. It was easily felt as an influence, and those who went into the desert long enough to forget its open spaces and its emptiness were inevitably thrust upon God as the only refuge and rhythm of being."

"The desert was held in a crazed communism by which Nature and the elements were for the free use of every known friendly person for his own purposes and no more. Logical outcomes were the reduction of this licence to privilege by the men of the desert, and their hardness to strangers unprovided with introduction or guarantee, since the common security lay in the common responsibility of kinsmen."

"The desert, like every landscape, had its own persona. It was a situation of white glare by day, white glare glimmering from the sands up into the atmosphere. Beneath, faintly showed the contours of the dunes as if through mist or water. Above, a flat coppery sky rested on the framework of the glare. Sometimes a formation of rock came swimming out of the glare like a great thorn-backed fish; items at a distance were of a tindery brittle blueness unlike the fluid blueness of a watered country. The heat of the desert was not like a heat, but like a whittling away. There seem to sound in the desert, a high-pitched whistling, but there was no sound save the furnace wind raising the sand like smoke from the ridges, as if the dunes actually burned. The word of the desert was this: I am made from all the dusts of the bones of men who have perished here, and my rocks are monuments to mountains I have ground away. There were no green places, no springs. To this desert, such as these were wounds which it had healed with aridity. What it could not eradicate, it buried. By night the sand chilled. Frost scaled its surfaces so it shone with a pure black shining. It was beautiful as only such a spot could be beautiful—because it had warped the natural laws, and here it told you the hideous was fair. And was believed."

"Encounters between strangers in the desert, while rare, were occasions of mutual suspicion, and masked by initial preparations on both sides for an incident that might prove either cordial or warlike."

"The memory stole over him: a desert is what you think it is. And now, you can think clearly... There were no lies here. All fancies fled away. That's what happened in all deserts. It was just you, and what you believed. What have I always believed? That, on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, in the end, more or less, turn out all right. You couldn't get that on a banner. But the desert looked better already."

""It's a little lonely in the desert..." "It is lonely when you're among people, too," said the snake."

"What makes the desert beautiful is that it hides, somewhere, a well."

"They make a desert and call it peace."

"I would say that the desert deserves to be called a temple of our God without walls. Since it is clear that God dwells in silence, we must believe that he loves the solitary expanses of the desert. ... Although God is present everywhere, and regards the whole world as his domain, we may believe that his preferred place is the solitudes of heaven and of the desert."

"Globalization made the large open spaces of the Americas, its “open frontiers,” valuable. Often these frontiers were only mythically open, since they were inhabited by indigenous peoples who were brutally dispossessed. All the same, the scramble for this newly valuable resource was one of the defining processes of the Americas in the second half of the nineteenth century. The sudden opening of this valuable frontier led not to parallel processes in the United States and Latin America, but to a further divergence, shaped by the existing institutional differences, especially those concerning who had access to the land. In the United States a long series of legislative acts, ranging from the Land Ordinance of 1785 to the Homestead Act of 1862, gave broad access to frontier lands. Though indigenous peoples had been sidelined, this created an egalitarian and economically dynamic frontier. In most Latin American countries, however, the political institutions there created a very different outcome. Frontier lands were allocated to the politically powerful and those with wealth and contacts, making such people even more powerful."

"We are the land, and the land is mother to us all."

"How far, O rich, do you extend your senseless avarice? Do you intend to be the sole inhabitants of the earth? Why do you drive out the fellow sharers of nature, and claim it all for yourselves? The earth was made for all, rich and poor, in common. Why do you rich claim it as your exclusive right? The soil was given to the rich and poor in common—wherefore, oh, ye rich, do you unjustly claim it for yourselves alone? Nature gave all things in common for the use of all; usurpation created private rights. Property hath no rights. The earth is the Lord's, and we are his offspring. The pagans hold earth as property. They do blaspheme God."

"LAND, n. A part of the earth's surface, considered as property. The theory that land is property subject to private ownership and control is the foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the superstructure. Carried to its logical conclusion, it means that some have the right to prevent others from living; for the right to own implies the right exclusively to occupy; and in fact laws of trespass are enacted wherever property in land is recognized. It follows that if the whole area of terra firma is owned by A, B and C, there will be no place for D, E, F and G to be born, or, born as trespassers, to exist."

"The Negro voter ... had, then, but one clear economic ideal and that was his demand for land, his demand that the great plantations be subdivided and given to him as his right. This was a perfectly fair and natural demand and ought to have been an integral part of Emancipation. To emancipate four million laborers whose labor had been owned, and separate them from the land upon which they had worked for nearly two and a half centuries, was an operation such as no modern country had for a moment attempted or contemplated. The German and English and French serf, the Italian and Russian serf, were, on emancipation, given definite rights in the land. Only the American Negro slave was emancipated without such rights and in the end this spelled for him the continuation of slavery."

"When they laid down their arms, we murdered them. We lied to them. We cheated them out of their lands. We starved them into signing fraudulent agreements that we called treaties which we never kept. We turned them into beggars on a continent that gave life for as long as life can remember. And by any interpretation of history, however twisted, we did not do right. We were not lawful nor were we just in what we did. For them, we do not have to restore these people, we do not have to live up to some agreements, because it is given to us by virtue of our power to attack the rights of others, to take their property, to take their lives when they are trying to defend their land and liberty, and to make their virtues a crime and our own vices virtues."

"Generally speaking, no young tree is allowed to stand on copyhold land."

"The land was ours before we were the land's. She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people. She was ours In Massachusetts, in Virginia, But we were England's, still colonials, Possessing what we still were unpossessed by, Possessed by what we now no more possessed. Something we were withholding made us weak Until we found out that it was ourselves We were withholding from our land of living, And forthwith found salvation in surrender. Such as we were we gave ourselves outright (The deed of gift was many deeds of war) To the land vaguely realizing westward, But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, Such as she was, such as she would become."

"The equal right of all men to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air — it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men have a right to be in this world, and others no right."

"This land is your land, this land is my land From California to the New York Island From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters This land is made for you and me."

"Happiness is... ...land"

"This land is the house we have always lived in"

"The emigration should be voluntary, for it would be as cruel as unjust to compel the aborigines to abandon the graves of their fathers and seek a home in a distant land. But they should be distinctly informed that if they remain within the limits of the States they must be subject to their laws. In return for their obedience as individuals they will without doubt be protected in the enjoyment of those possessions which they have improved by their industry. But it seems to me visionary to suppose that in this state of things claims can be allowed on tracts of country on which they have neither dwelt nor made improvements, merely because they have seen them from the mountain or passed them in the chase."

"Our system is to live in perpetual peace with the Indians, to cultivate an affectionate attachment from them, by everything just and liberal which we can do for them within the bounds of reason, and by giving them effectual protection against wrongs from our own people. The decrease of game rendering their subsistence by hunting insufficient, we wish to draw them to agriculture, to spinning and weaving. The latter branches they take up with great readiness, because they fall to women, who gain by quitting the labors of the field for those which are exercised within doors. When they withdraw themselves to the culture of a small piece of land, they will perceive how useless to them are their extensive forests, and will be willing to pare them off from time to time in exchange for necessaries for their farms and families. To promote this disposition to exchange lands, which they have to spare and we want, for necessaries, which we have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading uses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands."

"Look at the legacy of poor Eve's exile from Eden: the land shows the bruises of an abusive relationship. It’s not just land that is broken, but more importantly, our relationship to land."

"The federal government's Indian Removal policies wrenched many Native peoples from our homelands. It separated us from our traditional knowledge and lifeways, the bones of our ancestors, our sustaining plants—but even this did not extinguish identity. So the government tried a new tool, separating children from their families and cultures, sending them far away to school, long enough, they hoped, to make them forget who they were. [...] Children, language, lands: almost everything was stripped away, stolen when you weren't looking because you were trying to stay alive. In the face of such loss, one thing our people could not surrender was the meaning of land. In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital, or natural resources. But to our people, it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us. Our lands were where our responsibility to the world was enacted, sacred ground. It belonged to itself; it was a gift, not a commodity, so it could never be bought or sold. These are the meanings people took with them when they were forced from their ancient homelands to new places. Whether it was their homeland or the new land forced upon them, land held in common gave people strength; it gave them something to fight for. And so—in the eyes of the federal government—that belief was a threat."

"The land knows you, even when you are lost."

"The truth of our relationship with the soil is written more clearly on the land than in any book."

"If we allow traditions to die, relationships to fade, the land will suffer."

"What’s good for the land is also good for the people."

"The land is the real teacher. All we need as students is mindfulness."

"It is an odd dichotomy we have set for ourselves, between loving people and loving land. We know that loving a person has agency and power—we know it can change everything. Yet we act as if loving the land is an internal affair that has no energy outside the confines of our head and heart."

"The story of our relationship to the earth is written more truthfully on the land than on the page. It lasts there. The land remembers what we said and what we did. Stories are among our most potent tools for restoring the land as well as our relationship to land. We need to unearth the old stories that live in a place and begin to create new ones, for we are storymakers, not just storytellers. All stories are connected, new ones woven from the threads of the old."

"If one cousin buys land, the other cousin gets a stomachache."

"The Lord spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai, saying, ... "The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine. For you are strangers and sojourners with me.""

"The fate of North American Indian tribes frequently resembled that of the Australian Aborigines. European settlers arrived on their native territories and claimed the land for their own. When the Indians resisted, the settlers, supported by their colonial governments, or their national, state, and local governments, were quick to drive out or kill the Indians and their families or to force them onto reservations to live out their lives in alien surroundings. As in the case of the Aborigines, children were taken from Indian families, women were kidnapped and raped, promises of peace were made and broken, and claims of racial and civilizational superiority were used by the settlers to justify their land grabbing and their killing. North American native peoples, like the Aborigines, were highly susceptible to the diseases brought to their homelands by the settlers and prone to the abuse of alcohol, which the settlers purposely employed to undermine their ability to resist. Those settlers who raised livestock, primarily cows and sheep, tended to have the sharpest conlicts with the Indians, provoking massacres and outright warfare between Indian tribes and government and militia formations. The tendency of the North American settlers to see the Indians as hopelessly primitive and incapable of marshaling the resources of the land gave them “reason” to deprive those Indians of the most desirable lands and territories."

"After millennia of Native history, and centuries of displacement and dispossession, acknowledging original Indigenous inhabitants is complex. Many places in the Americas have been home to different Native Nations over time, and many Indigenous people no longer live on lands to which they have ancestral ties. Even so, Native Nations, communities, families, and individuals today sustain their sense of belonging to ancestral homelands and protect these connections through Indigenous languages, oral traditions, ceremonies, and other forms of cultural expression."

"Men did not make the earth. ... It is the value of the improvements only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. ... Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds."

"The land and all it contains, without which labor cannot be exerted, belong to no one man, but to all alike."

"Nor was thy Lord the one to destroy a land until He had sent to its centre an apostle, rehearsing to them Our Signs; nor are We going to destroy a land except when its inhabitants practise iniquity. The (material) things which ye are given are but the conveniences of this life and the glitter thereof; but that which is with Allah is better and more enduring: will ye not then be wise? Are (these two) alike?- one to whom We have made a goodly promise, and who is going to reach its (fulfilment), and one to whom We have given the good things of this life, but who, on the Day of Judgment, is to be among those brought up (for punishment)?"

"Buy land. They ain't making any more of the stuff."

"The first man who, having fenced off a plot of land, thought of saying, 'This is mine' and found people simple enough to believe him was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries and horrors might the human race have been spared by the one who, upon pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had shouted to his fellow men: 'Beware of listening to this imposter; you are lost if you forget the fruits of the earth belong to all and that the earth belongs to no one.'"

"The white men aren't friends to the Indians... At first they only asked for land sufficient for a wigwam; now, nothing will satisfy them but the whole of our hunting grounds from the rising to the setting sun."

"¡Tierra y Libertad!"

"La tierra es de quien la trabaja con sus manos."

"And it stood still upon the sand of the sea. And I saw a wild beast ascending out of the sea, with ten horns and seven heads, and upon its horns ten diadems, but upon its heads blasphemous names. Now the wild beast that I saw was like a leopard, but its feet were as those of a bear, and its mouth was as a lion’s mouth. And the dragon gave to [the beast] its power and its throne and great authority."

"A single grain of sand can have an influence far out of proportion to its size, but when it gathers together with vast numbers of its colleagues, very strange things can indeed happen."

"...the noise made by a single grain of sand moving with the waves is one of a series of tiny perceptions that we accumulate to hear the roar of the ocean."

"To see a world in a grain of sand/And a heaven in a wild flower."

"The mine which Time has slowly dug beneath familiar objects is sprung in an instant; and what was rock before, becomes but sand and dust."

"For nature is the noblest engineer, yet uses a grinding economy working up all that is wasted to-day in to to-marrows creation;not a superfluous grain of sand for all ostentation she makes of expense and public works."

"There are as many stars in the universe as all the grains of sand in the beaches of the world."

"The huge variety of sand grains is astounding, and each one has a story to tell."

"Examining sand grains through the microscope is a wonderful way to find out about the biology, and ecology of the local environment."

"Every grain of sand is a jewel waiting to be discovered. ... When we walk along a beach, we tread upon millions of years of biological and geological history."

"A wise man can pick up a grain of sand and envision a whole universe."

"Unhappy they who raise their hopes upon the shifting sand."

"History is a child building a sand castle by the sea and that child is the whole majesty of man’s power in the world."

"And so castle made of sand fall into the sea, eventually."

"If you speak ill of another do not speak it...write it in the sand near the water’s edge."

"Who could ever calculate the path of a molecule? How do we know the creations of worlds are not determined by falling grains of sand?"

"I wrote my name upon the sand; I thought I wrote it on thine heart. I had no touch of fear, that words, Such words, so graven, could depart."

"You may smile at the fanciful structures I rear, And say, that my castles are built but on sand ; Like bubbles, that on the blue waters appear, That sparkle, invite, and then sink from the hand."

"...the entire universe was there within a grain for our understanding."

"The sand (Hindi: mitti) in the arena is especially holy to them. In Benares it [sand] comes from the Ganges and is mixed with Ganges water, mustard oil, and turmeric in order to keep it soft and supple. On special occasions, milk and clarified butter (ghi) are also added. The ground must be turned, loosened, and renewed periodically. Only the master (Hindi:ustad) is allowed to enter the new sand after he has honoured it with flowers and incense. The young men not only rub themselves with sand, they also wallow in it. Sand is the balm for their heroism."

"The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it."

"It isn’t the mountain ahead that wears you out – it is the grain of sand in your shoe."

"Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It isn’t the mountain ahead that wears you out – it’s the grain of sand in your shoe."

"The crust of a tan man imbibed by the sand; soaking up the thirst of the land."

"I don't like sand. It's coarse, and rough, and irritating, and it gets everywhere."

"For Look! Within my hallow hand, While round the earth careens, I hold a single grain of sand And wonder what it means. Ah! If I had the eyes to see, And brain to understand, I think the Life’s mystery might be Solved in the grain of sand."

"The birth of a sand grain is a microscopic event, a flap of butterfly’s wings heralding greater change and a larger creation. Each grain carries the equivalent of the DNA of its parents and develops a character through its life and is moulded partly by its environment. Compared to the scale of a human life, however, the sand grains’ story is never ending, and rebirth is a regular event."

"Close to 70 percent of all sand grains on the earth are made of quartz."

"The sand grain has become a symbol of permanence and fragility of our – and - nature’s works."

"It has been estimated that on the order of a billion sand grains are born around the world every second."

"The sand grain is anonymous, waiting for rain and wind to sweep it away on an endless journey, to demonstrate its durability while its weaker companions fall by the way side. But it is called sand not because of what it is made of or its origins, bit because of how big it is."

"Sand is somewhat like beauty – we know it when we see it, or touch it, but it seems difficult to describe."

"Sand grains comes in variety of shapes, which can make measuring its size quite tricky."

"There are countless sand collectors around the world, and there have been for a long time. …Sand collectors call themselves as arenophiles or “sand lovers”- a mixture of Latin and Greek. The word arena derives from the ancient Roman habit of covering the ground in amphitheaters with sand (harena or arena in Latin) – to soak up blood. The pure Greek would be psammophile, and some sand collectors use this but it is commonly used also to describe plants and creatures that are sand-loving, forging a livelihood among the grains."

"Reflecting its potential fluidity and fickleness, sand, as the quintessential granular material, has become a symbol of instability and impermanence. The biblical admonition against building a house on sand may be exaggerated."

"In the great marshes and the wide lagoons, I am your persecuting demon."

"Tired with dull grief, grown old before my day, I sit in solitude and only hear Long silent laughters, murmurings of dismay, The lost intensities of hope and fear; In those old marshes yet the rifles lie."

"Enki knit together the marshlands, making young and old reeds grow there; he made birds and fish teem in the pools and lagoons"

"Where there was a marsh then in Unug, it was full of water. Where there was any dry land, Euphrates poplars grew there. Where there were reed thickets, old reeds and young reeds grew there."

"Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-with-holding and free Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea!"