Green rivers of corn, golden seas of wheat, white lakes of cotton meet and fuse and inter-cross. Cattle string across in frightened procession: multitudes on multitudes of horses, black, dun, grey, gallop away after them, jarring the earth with their hoofs, beating up dust in heavy, fluffy masses. Far away the sun lies still over broad patches of silence, sparsely green, where an eagle hovers, or an antelope starts up, or a sly, half-starving coyote is seen. The sun looks into yellow castles wedged in the cliff that were old when the first explorers saw them, and on white bulging palaces tinselled with marble and gold. The sun sees engines that rattle and cough, black derricks that wave their arms in arcs aloft, crazy log cabins that topple into the marsh. On every side are symbols of man’s desire, made with his hands, hurried, glorious, sordid, tragic, clashing, insane; the sun looks and does not understand but pours over them its heat and cold, and rain and light, and lightning, always the same. Immense machines are clamoring, rattling, battling, wheeling, screaming, heaving, weaving. The wheels bound and groan and roar and waver and snap—and go on as before. Between the cities, over plain and hill, reel double paths of shining steel, where screaming locomotives pass like black shuttles leaving great trails of smoke amid the wheat, the cattle, the corn, the cotton, the sordid, hideous factory shafts, the fleet masses of plunging and galloping stallions. Their forces are never spent or tired, for, nervously above them, earth is laced and wired with crackling, chattering, singing, whispering electricity. They fly from city to city, and the sky is scribbled above them with childish grey gigantic scrawls, amid which the sun wabbles and crawls. And over all shoot backward and forward words that walk in air, and perhaps not long will the upper spaces be still, but soon be filled with racing lines of strong black bird-machines bearing men on their backs. Purring autos squawk and squeal, and spray and flutter, pale flashes through the rack. Red, and black and yellow, the earth takes on its coat of colors, from the struggle of a hundred million hands. It is a palimpsest which no one reads or understands, which none has time to heed, a loom-frame woven over with interspersed and tangled threads of which the meaning is lost, from which the pattern hangs in shreds.