The Time Journey: A Traveler Among Stones

At night a clock with hands turning backward falls onto the narrator's desk, and a corridor opens onto an endless desert where he hears the stone of the pyramids of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure breathe. The clock carries him to the terraced trees of Babylon, to the Acropolis where the Parthenon is new and Phidias is working, and to a full Colosseum where he is the only stranger who does not cheer. He watches light slip beneath the dome of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, enters the Alhambra at sunset with the Sierra Nevada in the distance, asks the water at the Taj Mahal which building is real, the one on the earth or the one in the reflection, meets an Eiffel Tower that knows he was about to mention its mockers, and reaches the upward-looking towers of Manhattan, where the clock melts and asks him why he wants to return. In a city on no map a pyramid stands on a skyscraper and the Great Wall curls around the Moon, a child draws a building he means to construct in a distant future, and in a roofless court under the stars each building says what it gave humanity, the Pyramid wonder and the Parthenon proportion. Back at his desk he sees a line on his drawing as a decision, finds a grain of sand from Giza and a stone flower from Babylon beside the clock, and ends with the humility of a human being who tries only to find his place in a universe he did not make.