The mysterious monument of Stonehenge, standing remote on a bare and boundless heath, as much unconnected with the events of past ages as it is with the uses of the present, carries you back beyond all historical records into the obscurity of a totally unknown period.

The mountain is voiceless and imperturbable; and its very loftiness and serenity sometimes make us the more lonely.

Sea-like in billowy distance, far away </br> The half-broke prairies stretch on every hand; </br> How wide the circuit of their summer day— </br> What measureless acres of primeval land, </br> Treeless and birdless, by no eyesight spanned!

Over the hills and far away.

A desert is a place without expectation.

Only the land remained, the silent order of the mountains, the ground covered in fallen dead leaves in the enormous space, a boundless expanse - disguising, concealing, hiding, covering all that lies below the burning earth.

Over the summit, I saw the so-called Mono desert lying dreamily silent in the thick, purple light — a desert of heavy sun-glare beheld from a desert of ice-burnished granite.

The most distant mountains, like himself, just stood there and gazed.

When I flew over the Atlas Mountains in a plane, I realized that their formation-through erosion, geological dramas, the action of winds-was completely independent of our moral anxieties; man is in a kind of cyclone; he builds solid houses to protect and shelter his heart. Outside, nature is nothing but indifference, even terror.

Right in the heart of the Antarctic continent, in one of the coldest, most deserted and inaccessible places in the world.

Where the remote Bermudas ride,
In th' ocean's bosom unespied.

An immense freedom, vast beyond human measure, hung over everything. The days had no rules and the laws of nature themselves seemed suspended. There was no longer any need to rise for work in the morning. There were no masters and no slaves. There was only the desert, which held no threat, and the gullies among the rocks. And the fresh, boundless mornings with the thinnest of mists rising from the thorn trees and from the flowering star thistles in the plain. The silence was palpable. There was no end of sky. (p 16)

somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond any experience, your eyes have their silence; in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, or which i cannot touch because they are too near

I am alone, as though I stood On the highest peak of the tired gray world, About me only swirling snow, Above me, endless space unfurled; <p> With earth hidden and heaven hidden, And only my own spirit's pride To keep me from the peace of those Who are not lonely, having died.