Undergång

“See now Oblivion shimmering all around us, its very tranquility deadlier than the tempest. How little all our keels have troubled it. Time in its deeps swims like a monstrous whale; and, like a whale feeds on the littlest things – small tunes and little unskilled songs of the olden, golden evenings – and anon turneth whale-like to overthrow whole ships.

See now the wreckage of Babylon floating idly, and something there that once was Nineveh; already their kings and queens are in the deeps among the weedy masses of old centuries that hide the sodden bulk of sunken Tyre and make a darkness round Persepolis.

For the rest I dimly see the forms of foundered ships on the sea-floor strewn with crowns.

Our ships were all unseaworthy from the first.

There goes the raft that Homer made for Helen.”

Lord Dunsany