Page:The roamer and other poems (1920).djvu/137

The towering clouds, the long-drawn mountain-lines,
The painted plains, the luxury of light,
The expense of power and beauty's ornament,
The glow and sculpture of the dædal earth
Along the roadside, where by nations crawls
The caravan of time? O traitor world!
Thou art the inn of poverty and crime,
The warren of the poor wherein they breed
Hunger and cold, passion and woe, and death
In perpetuity. Kingdoms and states
Are but the shining surface of the flood,
Time's phosphorescence; deep below dips down
The unrecorded misery of the mass,
Creation's underworld. What is 't to men,—
The glamour of great ages yet to be
Wherein they shall not share? or glory gone,
A nameless epitaph?" On the last rise
The landscape sank beneath him, desert-wild,
White valleys of the chotts,—a far-strown world
Of endless desolation, chequered tracts,
Spotted with salty crusts, dim palms and wastes,
Interminable dearth; and in the way
Two, robed in white and worn with travel stains,

Girt with the knotted cord, scanned the strange sight;