After the many trails an open space Walled by the tulès of a perished lake; And there I stretched out, bending the green brake, And felt it cool against my heated face. My horse went cropping by a sunny crag, In wild oats taller than the antlered stag That makes his pasture there. In gorge below Blind waters pounded boulders, blow on blow— Waters that gather, scatter and amass Down the long canyons where the grizzlies pass, Slouching through manzanita thickets old, Strewing the small red apples on the ground, Tearing the wild grape from its tree-top hold, And wafting odors keen through all the hills around. Now came the fording of the hurling creeks, And joyous days among the breezy peaks, Till through the hush of many canyons fell The faint quick tenor of a brazen bell, A sudden, soft, hill-stilled, far-falling word, That told the secret of the straying herd. It was the brink of night, and everywhere Tall redwoods spread their filmy tops in air; Huge trunks, like shadows upon shadow cast, Pillared the under twilight, vague and vast. And one had fallen across the mountain way, A tree hurled down by hurricane to lie With torn-out roots pronged-up against the sky And clutching still their little dole of clay. Lightly I broke green branches for a bed, And gathered ferns, a pillow for my head. And what to this were kingly chambers worth— Sleeping, an ant, upon the sheltering earth, High over Mendocino’s windy capes, Where ships go flying south like shadow-shapes— Gleam into vision and go fading on, Bearing the pines hewn out of Oregon. The Witness of the Dust Voices are crying from the dust of Tyre, From Baalbec and the stones of Babylon— “We raised our pillars upon Self-Desire, And perished from the large gaze of the sun.” Eternity was on the pyramid, And immortality on Greece and Rome; But in them all the ancient Traitor hid, And so they tottered like unstable foam. There was no substance in their soaring hopes: The voice of Thebes is now a desert cry; A spider bars the road with filmy ropes, Where once the feet of Carthage thundered by. A bittern booms where once fair Helen laughed; A thistle nods where once the Forum poured; A lizard lifts and listens on a shaft, Where once of old the Colosseum roared. No house can stand, no kingdom can endure Built on the crumbling rock of Self-Desire: Nothing is Living Stone, nothing is sure, That is not whitened in the Social Fire.