What an enormous, limitless waste!—
Far in the distance an ostrich is striding.—
What can one fancy was really God’s
meaning in all of this voidness and deadness?
This desert, bereft of all sources of life;
this burnt-up cinder, that profits no one;
this patch of the world, that for ever lies fallow;
this corpse, that never, since earth’s creation,
has brought its Maker so much as thanks,—
why was it created?— How spendthrift is Nature!—
Is that sea in the east there, that dazzling expanse
all gleaming? It can’t be; ’tis but a mirage.
The sea’s to the west; it lies piled up behind me,
dammed out from the desert by a sloping ridge.
[A thought flashes through his mind.]
Dammed out? Then I could —? The ridge is narrow.
Dammed out? It wants but a gap, a canal,—
like a flood of life would the waters rush
in through the channel, and fill the desert!