Page:Taylor - In the Dwellings of the Wilderness.djvu/197

 swooping wings, Merritt turned in his saddle and looked back at the scene of his work. The excavations, only hastily filled up, gaped like open wounds—wounds which might never heal, but remain always open to the pitiless sun and the driving sand-storms and the holy nights—half-revealing, half-concealing the secrets which lay below. The half-buried corpse of the city that had been, sank again to its broken rest, to lie a while in pitiful nakedness, and be slowly buried once more, in the fulness of time, beneath the shifting sand. Man had come, and man had gone; man had come again, and now had gone, and the earth would reclaim her own. The inscrutable East, brooding and sombre, wise with forgotten evil lore, had conquered.

A sick goat, left behind as worthless,