who had walked its stones, and breathed its air, and, as a stranger, looked into its million dark and driven faces, and who could never make the city’s life his own.
And finally he brought to it the million memories of his fathers who were great men and knew the wilderness, but who had never lived in cities: three hundred of his blood and bone, who sowed their blood and sperm across the continent, walked beneath its broad and lonely lights, were frozen by its bitter cold, burned by the heat of its fierce suns, withered, gnarled, and broken by its savage weathers, and who fought like lions with its gigantic strength, its wildness, its limitless savagery and beauty, until with one stroke of its paw it broke their backs and killed them.
He brought to it the memory and inheritance of all these men and women who had worked, fought, drunk, loved, whored, striven, lived and died, letting their blood soak down like silence in the earth again, letting their flesh rot quietly away into the stern, the beautiful, the limitless substance of the everlasting earth from which they came, from which they were compacted, on which they worked and wrought and moved, and in whose immense and lonely breast their bones were buried and now lay, pointing eighty ways across the continent.
Above the pounding of the mighty wheels their voices had seemed to well out of the everlasting earth, giving to him, the son whom they had never seen, the dark inheritance of the earth and the centuries, which was his, even as his blood and bone were his, but which he could not fathom. “Whoever builds a bridge across this earth,” they cried, “whoever lays a rail across this mouth, whoever stirs the dust where these bones lie, let him go dig them up, and say his Hamlet to the engineers. Son, son,” their voices said, "is the earth richer where our own earth lay? Must you untwist the vine-root from the buried heart? Have you unrooted mandrake from our brains? Or the rich flowers, the big rich flowers, the strange unknown flowers?
"You must admit the grass is thicker here. Hair grew like April on our buried flesh. These men were full of juice, you’ll grow good corn here, golden wheat. The men are dead, you say? They may be dead, but you’ll grow trees here; you’ll grow an oak, but we were richer than an oak: you’ll grow a plum tree here that’s bigger than an oak, it will be all filled with plums as big as little apples.
“We were great men and mean men hated us,” they said. "We were all men who cried out when we were hurt, wept when we were sad, drank,
