Five Remarks

1.  The Monument

Always once -- here once sat (always) -- here is the monument.  The moment could have been embellished with light and adorned by the form of gods.  Desire quickens it until it has meaning, and on that spot, in what is now empty as space and still as time, they erected the memory.  That there would be a memory is their legacy's erection.

2. All But

The desert is a collection of sand and hills of sand.  It offers space at the behest of an unknown benefactor to a nameless god.  The wind is a voice, still singing the old song -- but breathlessly.  It exhales and it sighs, it hums and soughs.  Though it is a spirit -- though it is a memory -- repetition without rebirth, idleness but not recreation, echo without voice, sound save for thought.

3. A Tableau of Emotions

The desert is a tableau of emotions felt then passing.  They have drifted and accumulate.  In the sun they are made as pure as time.

4.  Faith

The desert is a belief -- the desert is a faith.  It hardly matters that these still regions once surged with froth and foam -- that green clothed the hills as distinctly as blue is a raiment for the sky.  It was shaggy and infested -- it groaned with propagation -- it was beset by breeze and dusk.  Then the flowers held back the blaze of the sun and the water made a reservoir of heat to decorate white ice.  Eggs were laid and hatched where the fish all swarmed.

5.  Shadows

All the men in the room were the shadows of other men -- but even those men were only the shadows of their shadows.